Track U. BrainLinks-BrainTools-Methods and tools for neural engineering

Abstract

Diseases and disorders of the brain like epilepsy, stroke, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, mood and anciety disorders, addiction and traumatic brain injury affect millions of persons worldwide, restrict their participation in work and social like and decrease their quality of life, dramatically. In Europe, the costs of treating these patients have exceeded even the sum of costs to treat cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation of these diseases needs interventions with the brain to collect neuronal signals, understand pathophysiological changes and propose new treatment options to record neural activity, identify states of the brain and overwrite “wrong” signal patterns when necessary. The BrainLinks-BrainTools Cluster of Excellence focus its research on the development of methods and tools to probe the brain and to investigate the behaviour of neuronal networks after stroke, in epilepsy, in movement and mood disorders and in paralyzed subjects. Probe technologies that needed to get developed to probe the brain on the single cell level as well as the network level have been developed over the last years. They include electrical as well as optical approaches and allow non-destructive analysis of the anatomy and morphology of brain regions, intracortical as well as epicortical recording of electrical signals over more than one hundred channels and optical interaction with genetically modified nerve cells in the field of optogenetics. Electronic circuitry has been developed to integrate functionality in smallest low noise and low power systems to amplifiy smallest nerve signals. Signal processing needs to go beyond clinical diagnosis methods in both, non-invasive and invasive settings, to obtain robust and reliable information about brain states that is necessary to drive assistive devices and deliver closed-loop therapies.