Implanting mental illness in the brain of AI for treatment and analysis

According to the Nature website, the research team funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing equipment to record nerve activity and auto-stimulate the brain. The device is mainly used to treat mental disorders controlled by AI. Brain implants for mood disorders are currently undergoing human trials.

Brain implants that provide electrical impulses for human emotions and behavior are currently being tested on humans for the first time. Two teams funded by DARPA have begun preliminary trials of “closed-loop” brain implants that use algorithms to detect patterns associated with mood disorders.

These devices can stimulate the brain to return to a healthy state without the need for doctors to personally perform the stimulation.

The recent study, presented at the Society of Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Washington, DC, may eventually lead to a breakthrough in the serious mental illness that is currently difficult to treat. At the same time, it also caused thorny ethical issues, especially considering that the technology may allow researchers to understand the inner feelings of people in real time.

The general approach - using brain implants to provide electrical impulses to alter neural activity - is called deep brain stimulation. It is used to treat activity disorders such as Parkinson's disease, but it is not as effective in the trials of treating mood disorders. Early evidence suggests that persistent stimulation of specific areas of the brain relieves chronic depression, but a large study involving 90 patients with depression found no improvement in patients' condition after one year of treatment.

Scientists behind DARPA-funded projects say their research may be successful in previous attempts to fail because their brain implants are designed for the treatment of mental illness – and only needed It will only be turned on. "We have a lot of understanding of the limitations of existing technologies," said Edward Chang, a neuroscientist who led one of the projects at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

DARPA is supporting Edward's research team and another research team at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with the ultimate goal of treating soldiers and veterans with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Both teams wanted to create an implanted electrode system to track the activity of various parts of the brain as it was stimulated.

They are developing their technology in trials for people with epilepsy who have implanted electrodes in their brains to track their seizures. Researchers can use those electrodes to record how the patient's brain is being stimulated intermittently—without continuous stimulation, unlike older implants.

At SFN (the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience), the team of electrical engineers at the University of Southern California, Omid Sani, and Edward Chang showed the first episode about how emotions "encode" in the brain over time. Map. He and colleagues conducted a study of six epileptic patients who had implanted electrodes and tracked their brain activity and mood in detail over a period of one to three weeks. By comparing these two types of information, researchers can write algorithms to "decode" their emotional changes based on human brain activity.

Sani said that Edward often and his team were ready to find the right volunteers to test their new single closed loop system. Edward often adds that they have tested some kind of closed-loop stimulation on people. However, he did not disclose the details because the study is still in its infancy.

The research team at the Massachusetts General Hospital is taking a different approach. Instead of detecting specific emotions or mental illnesses, they want to correlate brain activity with behaviors that exist in multiple mood disorders, such as difficulty concentrating and lack of empathy. At the SFN conference, they talked about algorithmic tests they developed to stimulate their brains as they distract from specific tasks, including matching digital images or identifying emotions through facial expressions.

The researchers found that providing electrical impulses to brain regions involved in decision making and emotions greatly improved the performance of test participants. The team also mapped the brain activity that occurred when a person was unable to cope or slow down in a particular task because of forgetfulness or distraction, and found that the participants were able to reverse the bad performance with brain stimulation. Researchers are currently testing algorithms that automatically stimulate the brain based on specific patterns of brain activity.

Wayne Goodman, a psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, hopes that closed-loop stimulation will prove to be a better long-term treatment for mood disorders than previous brain deep-stimulation attempts—partly because of the latest generation The algorithm is more targeted, based on physiological signals, not doctor's judgment. "You have to do a lot of debugging before you can do it," Goodman said. He is about to launch a small closed-loop stimulation test to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He pointed out that one of the challenges in stimulating brain regions associated with emotions is that there may be situations in which excessive corrections are made, such as ecstasy or even overshadowing all other emotions. Other ethical considerations arise because the algorithm used for closed-loop stimulation can tell the researchers what the inner mood of the subject is. Alik Widge, a neuroengineer and psychiatrist at Harvard University and a team engineering director at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that although researchers can't read people's minds directly, "but we will be exposed to activities that reflect their emotions." Information. Like the team of Edward Chang and Goodman, Vicki's team is working with neuroethicists to solve complex ethical concerns surrounding their research.

However, Edward often pointed out that brain stimulation techniques developed by his team and others are only the first step toward bringing better treatments to mood disorders. He predicts that data from brain implant trials will help researchers develop non-invasive therapies that stimulate the brain through the skull by targeting the mental illness. “The exciting thing about these technologies is,” he said. “We will have a window for the first time to understand what’s going on inside the brain and know if the condition is recurring.”