Brain Recording Bettered

Mapping electrical activity in the brain during surgery helps doctors determine which parts are functioning, which maybe diseased, and which bits are safe to remove or treat. The surgeon places a flexible sensor – arranged as a grid of typically 16 to 64 channels – directly onto the cortex to get the most accurate readings possible. But while such sensors can resolve electrical signals to approximately the nearest centimetre, a newly developed one (pictured) is set to provide 100x better resolution – to the nearest millimetre. The new sensor has 1024 channels (in a 3.2cm square grid) or 2048 (in an 8cm square) and is made from thinner, more flexible material than previous iterations to enable a better fit to the contours of the cortex. In short, if this device can be proven safe for clinical use it would give brain surgeons unprecedented accuracy in determining borders between healthy and unhealthy tissue.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by David Baillot, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
• Integrated Electronics and Biointerfaces Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research by Youngbin Tchoe, Andrew M Bourhis & Daniel R Cleary, et al Published in Science Translational Medicine, January 2022