Blackrock Microsystem for Translational Research

项目总结

Project Summary The objective of this project is to purchase a state of the art system to collect high- bandwidth multi-scale neurophysiologic data to understand functional networks in the human brain in health and disease. The equipment will form the core of a multi- disciplinary team of investigators in the fields of Neuroscience, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychology, Computational Neuroscience, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It will also dramatically increase the productivity of an international, multi-university collaborative research network we have established to collect and share human neurophysiologic data for research worldwide through the NINDS-funded International Epilepsy Neurophysiology Database. Major areas of research focus in our investigative team include epilepsy, memory and cognition, hearing, olfaction and movement disorders. Our collaborative group has been extremely productive to date using a 256 channel Neuralynx recording system that was funded through an S10 grant awarded in 2011. The equipment being requested in this submission consists of a 512 channel, Blackrock Neuroport data acquisition and processing system for neural recordings. The project is a close collaboration between the Penn School of Medicine, where patients implanted with intracranial electrodes during evaluation for epilepsy surgery will be cared for and the School of Engineering, where expertise for collecting, processing, archiving and analyzing these types of large, high-resolution data sets resides. Investigators throughout the university have current research projects and will craft studies to look at neurophysiological data coming from these patients. Purchasing this equipment will dramatically expand our collaborative group at UPenn, and our research output, as it is currently limited to recording 256 channels from the Neuralynx. We are poised to test prototypes of exciting new flexible, active electrode devices we have developed here at Penn, and the timing of this award will be synchronized with some of these first new human implants.