John Seymour on directional depth arrays and the future of neurosurgery

Dr John Seymour is an Associate Professor at UT Health in Neurosurgery and at Rice University where his lab works on electrophysiology studies, biophysics modeling, and applying machine learning models to decoding of neural activity. A major project in our lab is focused on developing a long-term brain-machine interface for the treatment of aphasia or locked-in syndrome.

***This podcast is sponsored by Ripple Neuro, check out their Neuroscience Research Tools here***

Top 3 Takeaways:

• "Your job as the engineer is to create a high resolution map of a crowd's vocalization during some live event, the rules are, you only get the place, say 10 or 20 devices throughout the stadium but only on these devices. At some point you realize more and more microphones on these poles are going to generate redundant information and they won't help us in our challenge to map the vocalization of this massive stadium. People have a very good intuition for sounds and we all understand sound is directional. Neural signals act the same way."
• "A rough rule of thumb is if the substrate diameter is on the order of magnitude of the source size, then there is good directionality in that situation."
• One day neural devices will be based on the patient's anatomy and will be printed on-demand to match the patient

0:45 "Do you want to introduce yourself better than I just did?"

2:45 "Geographically, how close are Rice and UT health?"

3:15 "You're saying the future of neural implants is additive depth electrodes. What does that mean?"

13:45 Sponsorship by Ripple Neuro

14:15 "What's the solution, to try to make them directional?"

16:30 "So you basically need your collector to be as small as possible?"

18:30 "So by finding the right size of the electrode and the substrate diameter you're able to have directional electrodes?"

22:45 "What's the advantage of your technology? What does it change?"

28:00 " If you had unlimited funding, what would you be able to do with it?"

33:00 What kind of differences of electrode design would you expect patient to patient?

34:45 "These few years ago, you said you were at Rice before, exclusively, and then now moved to both UT Health and Rice. What's that been like?"

42:00"Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"