Description of the CyberRat Project

C y b e r R a t

A Brain-Chip Interface for High-resolution Bi-directional Communication

One of the major technological challenges in Neuroscience and its application fields (Neurology, Neurocomputation, Brain-machine interfacing, Robotics) is to establish bi-directional communication (recording and stimulation) with the nervous tissue of the brain at high spatial resolution. Major operations, like sensory-motor control and cognition, are sustained by the concurrent activity of a large number of neurons located in several interconnected brain structures, which are themselves composed of complex neural networks. This leads to a challenging problem to tackle: actual techniques allow for either high precision recordings from one or, at most, a few single neurons, as intracellular recording approaches, or for low spatial resolution recordings with a sparse sampling within the networks. Instead, what is needed to better understand brain circuit operations and to develop powerful brain-machine interfaces is a technique capable of:

1. bi-directional communication, thus allowing not only to record but also to control neuronal activity;
2. high-spatiotemporal resolution sampling of a large number of neurons over the networks, and this simultaneously in multiple regions of the brain