Next: Increasing neuroplasticity via neuroimaging-enhanced brain stimulation

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apparatus
– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 7,756,584

Today we high­light a very thought-pro­vok­ing (pun intend­ed) patent by Advanced Neu­ro­mod­u­la­tion Sys­tems. (As men­tioned, we are fea­tur­ing a foun­da­tion­al Per­va­sive Neu­rotech patent a day, from old­er to new­er by issue date)

U.S. Patent No. 7,756,584: Meth­ods and appa­ra­tus for effec­tu­at­ing a last­ing change in a neur­al-func­tion of a patient

  • Assignee(s): Advanced Neu­ro­mod­u­la­tion Sys­tems, Inc.
  • Inventor(s): W. Dou­glas Sheffield, Andrew D. Fir­lik, Kat­ri­na S. Firlik
  • Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Tran­scra­nial Stimulation
  • Issue Date: July 13, 2010

SharpBrains’ Take:

The ‘584 patent dis­clos­es tech­niques for iden­ti­fy­ing stim­u­la­tion sites of the brain to facil­i­tate plas­tic­i­ty that can aid in reha­bil­i­ta­tion of dys­func­tion result­ing from a stroke, trau­mat­ic injury, etc. In an exten­sive spec­i­fi­ca­tion (with 23 illus­tra­tion sheets and 15 pages of writ­ten mate­r­i­al), the ‘584 patent dis­clos­es iden­ti­fy­ing one or more regions that, if stim­u­lat­ed, will ben­e­fit the patient despite those region(s) nei­ther being a direct­ly dam­aged brain region nor being nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the body part con­trolled by the dam­age brain region. By dis­cern­ing addi­tion­al stim­u­la­tion areas, the ‘584 patent takes advan­tage of the brain’s abil­i­ty to recruit and re-pur­pose var­i­ous brain struc­tures for a vari­ety of brain func­tions. The valu­able teach­ing to the field of stim­u­la­tion-based reha­bil­i­ta­tion, along with a sub­stan­tial num­ber of depen­dent claims cov­er­ing like­ly treat­ment uses such as detect­ing nov­el stim­u­la­tion sites using fMRI, are amongst the fac­tors mak­ing the ‘584 patent a key non-inva­sive neu­rotech­nol­o­gy patent.

Abstract:

The fol­low­ing dis­clo­sure is drawn to meth­ods of elec­tri­cal­ly stim­u­lat­ing areas of the brain in which neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty are occur­ring. The stim­u­la­tion site may be dif­fer­ent than the region in the brain where neur­al activ­i­ty is typ­i­cal­ly present to per­form the par­tic­u­lar neur­al func­tion accord­ing to the func­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion of the brain. The dis­clo­sure pro­vides meth­ods of iden­ti­fy the loca­tion in which neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty is occur­ring, not occur­ring or expect­ed to occur.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 1. A method of effec­tu­at­ing a neur­al-func­tion of a patient, comprising:

  • select­ing a stim­u­la­tion site by (a) gen­er­at­ing an intend­ed neur­al activ­i­ty by trig­ger­ing a neur­al sig­nal from an impaired body part affect­ed by neur­al dys­func­tion of the patien­t’s brain, where­in trig­ger­ing a neur­al sig­nal includes mov­ing, stim­u­lat­ing or mov­ing and stim­u­lat­ing the impaired body part, (b) detect­ing a cor­ti­cal region of the brain in which a response to neur­al activ­i­ty occurs in reac­tion to the neur­al sig­nal, the detect­ed cor­ti­cal region being at a cor­ti­cal loca­tion of the brain dif­fer­ent than a nor­mal cor­ti­cal loca­tion of the brain where neur­al activ­i­ty typ­i­cal­ly occurs to car­ry out a func­tion of the impaired body part, and © select­ing the stim­u­la­tion site to be with­in the detect­ed cor­ti­cal region;
  • posi­tion­ing at least a first elec­trode at the stim­u­la­tion site; and
  • apply­ing an elec­tri­cal poten­tial to pass a cur­rent through the first electrode.