Evaluation of a minimally invasive endovascular neural interface for decoding motor activity

Abstract

Endovascular devices like the Stentrode™ provide a minimally invasive approach to brain-machine-interfaces that mitigates safety concerns while maintaining good signal quality. Our research aims to evaluate the feasibility of using a stent-electrode array (Stentrode) to decode movements in sheep. In this study, two sheep were trained to perform an automated forced-choice task designed to elicit left and right head movement following an external stimulus. Cortical, movement-related signals were recorded using a Stentrode placed in the superior sagittal sinus adjacent to the motor cortex. Recorded brain signal was used to train a support vector machine classifier. Our results show that the Stentrode can be used to acquire motor-related brain signals to detect movement of the sheep in a forced-choice task. These results support the validity of using the Stentrode as a minimally invasive brain-machine interface.