[과학]Lou Gehrig’s disease patient who can’t speak becomes speechless!…Brain electronics technology draws attention

Dr. Stephen Hawking suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, a disease that prevents him from moving his muscles and makes him unable to speak.

American researchers have succeeded in converting what a patient with Lou Gehrig’s disease wants into real words by inserting special electrodes in the brain.

This is Seong-gyu Lee.

[기자]

Cathy Harrell, 45, suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, which prevents her from moving her muscles well.

With a special device attached to his brain, he tries to say something.

Then the words appear on the computer screen exactly as he thought.

He, who was unable to speak due to Lou Gehrig’s disease and could not even move his lip muscles, was able to communicate again thanks to 256 electrodes implanted in the area of ​​his brain. -related to speech.

This device, called a brain-computer interface (BCI), measures speech-related brain signals and then interprets them with a computer.

[세르게이 스태비스키 / UC 데이비스 연구소장 : 우리는 결함을 피해 가려고 합니다. 환자의 말을 근육에 전달하려는 뇌 부위를 측정합니다. 그런 다음 이 뇌의 활성 패턴을 말의 단위인 음절, 환자가 말하려는 바로 번역합니다.]

The researchers went one step further and succeeded in restoring the words that appeared on the computer screen to Harrell’s voice by analyzing video audio recorded before Harrell developed the disease Lou Gehrig.

[캐시 해럴 / 루게릭병 환자 : 음성 복원은 좀 더 나처럼 느끼게 합니다.]

The researchers raised the accuracy of the BCI device they developed to 97% through 84 clinical training sessions over 32 weeks.

Interest in BCI technology is growing as Neuralink, a brain science company led by Elon Musk, implanted a computer chip into the brain of a second spinal cord injury patient earlier this month.

Although there are still some improvements to be made, such as the need to drill into the patient’s skull to insert electrodes, it is becoming a new breakthrough in the treatment of related diseases.

This is Seong-gyu Lee from YTN Science.

Video editing: Kim Young-hwan

YTN Lee Seong-gyu ([email protected])

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