In a story drawn from the opening scenes of a sci-fi horror film, scientists have bridged a critical gap between the biological and the electronic. The study, published in Nature Electronics (summarized in Nature), details a “hybrid biocomputer” that combines lab-grown human brain tissue with conventional circuits and ai. Dubbed Brainoware, the system learned to identify voices with 78 percent accuracy. One day it could lead to silicon microchips fused with neurons.
Brainoware combines brain organoids (groups of human cells derived from stem cells transformed into “mini brains” filled with neurons) with conventional electronic circuits. To do so, the researchers placed “a single organoid on a plate containing thousands of electrodes to connect the brain to electrical circuits.” The circuits, which are directed to the brain organoid, “translate the information they want to introduce into a pattern of electrical pulses.”
The brain tissue then learns and communicates with the technology. A sensor in the electronic matrix detects the minibrain's response, which a trained machine learning algorithm decodes. In other words, with the help of ai, neurons and electronics merge into a single (extremely basic, for now) problem-solving biomachine.
The researchers taught the brain-computer system to recognize human voices. They trained Brainoware on 240 recordings of eight people speaking, “translating the audio into electrical for delivery to the organoid.” The organic part reacted differently to each voice while generating a pattern of neural activity that the ai learned to understand. Brainoware learned to identify voices with 78 percent accuracy.
The team sees the work as more of a proof of concept than something with practical, short-term use. Although previous studies presented Two-dimensional neuronal cell cultures could do similar things; This is the first test to use a trained three-dimensional set of human brain cells. It could point to a future of biological computing, where the “speed and efficiency of human brains” generate super-powerful ai. (What can go wrong?)
Arti Ahluwalia, a biomedical engineer at the Italian University of Pisa, believes that technology sheds more light on the human brain. Since brain organoids can duplicate the control center of the nervous system in ways that simple cell cultures cannot, the researcher believes that Brainoware (and the additional advances it could generate) helps model and study neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's. “That's where the promise is; use them to hopefully one day replace animal models of the brain,” Ahluwalia said. Nature.
Challenges for the strange proto-cyborg technology include keeping the organoids alive, especially when they are moved to more complex areas where scientists eventually want to deploy them. Brain cells must grow in an incubator, which could be more complicated with larger organoids. Next steps include working to learn how brain organoids adapt to more complex tasks and designing them for greater stability and reliability.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-fuse-lab-grown-human-brain-tissue-with-electronics-175507932.html?src=rss
