tim@netlab.cis.brown.edu (Timothy Miller) (04/14/90)
I have only been reading this newsgroup for a short time, so I don't know whether this has been posted before, but you may be interested in a paper by Wan, Kovacs, Rosen, and Widrow entitled "Development of Neural Network Interfaces for Direct Control of Neuroprostheses". It's in vol 2 (applications track) of the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Jan 1990, edited by Maureen Caudill, and published by Lawrence Erlblum Associates, Publishers, Hillsdale, NJ. It's right at the beginning (of vol 2), under Plenary Lecture by Bernard Widrow. Basically, it seems that these people are working on developing a silicon wafer with an array of holes and microelectrodes, to be implanted in a nerve that has been deliberately severed, so that the axons will regrow through the holes, giving direct access to the nerve at or near the single axon level. They're also working on the interfacing mechanisms for this too. It seems that they have done some preliminary studies in animals where they have actually gotten the axons to grow through the holes the way they want them. Tim