Brain Tiger Technology: Running at the forefront of "brain-computer interface" and achieving phased results in cross-border integration

At the just-concluded World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the theme of brain-inspired intelligence and brain-computer interface has become one of the frontier directions of focus. Combining biotechnology and information technology (BTIT), brain-computer interface has become a new role in the era of cross-border integration. It is a connection channel between biological nervous system and digital system, and it is an emerging and disruptive technology field.

After more than two years of development, Brain Tiger Technology released seven scientific research results on the forum, introducing recent exploration and results from three dimensions: flexible electrodes, animal experiments, and exploratory human experiments. The animal employee experiments of Brain Tiger Technology aroused great interest from the audience, especially the 2-year-old Labrador "Neo" and the 7-year-old rhesus monkey "Wukong". After brain-computer interface electrode implantation surgery, they were successfully implanted with 256-channel cortical electrodes and were able to collect LFP signals.

In May of this year, we conducted an experiment and implanted a semi-invasive brain-computer interface device into rhesus monkeys, successfully allowing them to participate in and complete the ping pong game. Peng Lei, co-founder and CEO of Brain Tiger Technology, said that the brain-computer interface was implanted in rhesus monkeys for game playing experiments. In terms of decoding accuracy, the correlation between the predicted trajectory and the real trajectory was more than 85%, and the delay was controlled within 30ms. , while achieving stable decoding for more than 14 days. By laying a solid scientific research foundation for future brain control experiments, we have taken the first step towards clinical experiments.

China’s “brain-computer road” requires a long and hard work before it has a long way to go

This year is a special year, because it has been 50 years since we first proposed the concept of brain-computer interface. It was first proposed by American scientists in 1973. In China, brain-computer interface has developed for 20 years and has become the core technology and breakthrough focus of the industry.

President Ming Dong, Vice President of Tianjin University, said at the forum, "We have spent 20 years catching up with the Americans on the road that they have gone through for 50 years, and this process is inseparable from everyone's joint efforts. Brain-computer interface is a game-changer. An important disruptive technology that can change our human life, production and even the bottom layer, the future of brain-computer interface is worthy of all our expectations. However, today's brain-computer interface is still in its infancy and faces huge challenges and a long road. .”

Tao Hu, deputy director of the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences and founder of Brainhu Technology, is also the responsible expert in the field of simulated brain for the "China Brain Project" and has led the team to launch a unique flexible brain-computer interface technology based on silk protein. , Compared with the implantable solutions of other teams, this flexible technology has more advantages in terms of the trauma of the surgery itself and the long-term safety and stability of the body after implantation. The next step in the development of brain-computer interfaces is to increase bandwidth and precision, which means that more neurons can be recorded simultaneously and the quality of the signals can be improved.

Tao Hu believes that the brain is like a supercomputer. On the one hand, it is powerful and has more than 80 billion neurons. Each of them can interact with hundreds or thousands of surrounding neurons to form a powerful network. On the other hand, this "supercomputer" consumes very little energy, averaging less than 30 watts. While top-level supercomputers designed according to the von Neumann architecture have extremely powerful computing power, their power consumption is worth several Thousands of households.

To make computers have the capabilities and "performance-to-power ratio" of the human brain, there are currently two possible paths: one is to develop brain-like chips and brain-like computing architecture through brain-inspired research to simulate brain operation; the other is to Interact with the human brain with the help of brain-computer interface, skip the facial features and limbs, and directly utilize the core capabilities of the brain.

Tao Hu believes that brain-computer interface is the process of turning patients back into normal people, which means more clinical research and greater diagnosis and treatment of major brain diseases. The ceiling of brain-computer interface is to turn normal people into supermen. It is hoped that through brain-computer interface, our brains can be combined with more powerful sensors and actuators from the outside world, so that our five senses and limbs can be extended more.

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