RT @ScienceTM: Harnessing both low- and high-frequency epidural electrical stimulation, researchers devise personalized protocols that fost….

RT @_smicera: New paper in @ScienceTM showing how a clinically available device can be used to reduce #spasticity and to restore #walking i….

RT @BioelDrop: A new #stimulation protocol to treat spinal cord injury⚡. Out in @ScienceTM , researchers from @SanRaffaeleMI led by @Simone….

Of course, this is a huge team work carried on with co-first authors Elena Losanno, @Daniele20590, Luigi Albano, Filippo Agnesi and with many many other great researchers. Special thanks go to dr Sandro Iannaccone, in whose rehab unit the patients underwent an incredible path 8/8.

The work was carried in a collaboration between @SanRaffaeleMI, @MyUniSR, @SantAnnaPisa, and @EPFL_en, which gave birth to the @MINE_Neurotech, co-led by prof @_smicera and prof Pietro Mortini. My deepest thanks go to them for setting up an incredible research environment 7/8.

This is of course preliminary work on the first two patients from a larger clinical trial in epidural stimulation in SCI patients ongoing at @SanRaffaeleMI, but shows that we are far from having exhausted all the resources that electrical stimulation can provide to patients 6/8.

Our patients showed important longitudinal functional improvements (with both stimulation on and off) through an intensive rehabilitation program enabled and enhanced by combined high- and low-frequency electrical stimulation 5/8.

Most importantly, tonic kHz stimulation can be applied concurrently with tonic low-frequency stimulation to act to "weaken" spastic muscles and to "strengthen" impaired muscles, opening the road to tailoring highly patient-specific rehab protocols 4/8.

We show that kilohertz-frequency stimulation can reduce hyper-reflexia, hyper-tonia, and pathological muscle co-contractions, increasing functional performance in complex tasks like walking and stair climbing, and allowing training the antagonists to spastic muscles 3/8.

Spasticity frequently develops after spinal cord injury (approx 70% of cases) and can reduce the effectiveness of electrical stimulation, which traditionally increases muscle contraction strength potentially leading to a general stiffening of the patients' legs 2/8.

Check out our last work in @ScienceTM!. We introduce and characterize a new epidural electrical stimulation protocol helping to reduce spastic muscle co-contractions while using traditional stimulation to strengthen residual functions. A thread 1/8.

And thanks to @saramoccia for the patient help and supervision about how deep learning could help optic nerve prostheses, and to @_smicera for helping all of us become better translational neuro-engineers every day! 12/12.

I would like to thank all co-authors (@lauratoni98, Gabriele), and particularly first authors @d_danieladeluca for her work on deep learning and experiments, and Luca Pierantoni for developing much of the cleverness behind our geometrical model during his master thesis! 11/12.

In our paper, we also explore a number of other (minor but not negligible) factors like how our model generalizes to imperfect retinotopy, malfunctioning electrodes, inhomogeneous fiber distribution, RGC death. be sure to check the full article! 10/12.

Biomimetic stimulation was "simulated" through a geometrical procedure but produced similar results to much more computationally expensive biophysically accurate simulations, thus suggesting that our results may be translated to real visual prostheses 9/12

Finally, we asked healthy subjects to look at natural indoor and outdoor scenes through our model, and managed to show that in the end the huge advantage of wide-field low-resolution prosthetics would be in highly dynamic environments, where visual exploration is limited 8/12

Optic nerve stimulation could provide wide-field perceptions at the cost of spatial resolution! Using deep learning-based semantic segmentation and depth cameras, we encoded visual scenes in order to leverage as much as possible the advantages of optic nerve stimulation 7/12

Then, we supposed to implant a grid-like electrode array and to stimulate biomimetically the optic nerve, and determined what is the effect of this distortion to the best-case scenario optic nerve stimulation, comparing it with state-of-the-art retinal stimulation 6/12

Once we had this model, we could explain very easily where did the extreme phosphene elongation come: from the huge mismatch between the very inhomogeneous distribution of receptive fields in the visual field and the quite homogeneous distribution of optic nerve fibers! 5/12

The main problem was to assign in an orderly fashion RGC receptive fields in the visual field, soma locations on the retina, axon locations in the optic nerve transverse section. The most mathematically challenging scenario is perfect retinotopy, which we reproduced! 4/12