Engineering Better Brain Implants for the Future of Medicine Patrick J. Rousche, Ph.D. Bioengineering, and co-PI Laxman Saggere, Ph.D. Mechancial Engineering Prime Grant Support: National Science Foundation Career Award and National Institutes of Health R21…> Problem Statement and Motivation Key Achievements and Future Goals The complex neural tissue of the brain is the source or destination for almost all motor and sensory information in the human body Therefore, multi-channel electrode interfaces with the brain hold great potential as a therapeutic tool for a number of clinical conditions such as paralysis, blindness, and deafness The architecture of the brain presents an incredible biological, chemical and mechanical design challenge for engineers designing such interfaces Development of a cell-culture test chamber Demonstration of sensory and motor brain signal recording in awake and behaving rats Beginning of a related study to study stroke in collaboration with the UIC Department of Neurosurgery Extension of the animal work into bio-robotics Presentations at IEEE-EMBS (Engineering in Medicine and Biology) conferences Future: Engineering analysis and design study for optimization of an electrode design suitable for human auditory cortex to treat deafness in humans Microneurosurgery Electrophysiology Technical Approach Animal Behavior Device Manufacture Bio-inspired design. By incorporating biocompatible materials and biological surface coatings, brain implants capable of long-term survival and function may be possible. ? Mechanically-compatible design. Further improvements to implant performance may come from the novel use of flexible implant materials. Flexible, biocompatible, electrode arrays are developed in the MAL and tested in a rat model. Neural cell culture is also used in the initial design phase to better understand the interactions at the neuron-device interface.

First Responder Pathogen Detection System (FiRPaDS) Investigator: Bhaskar DasGupta, Computer Science Prime Grant Support: NSF (including a CAREER grant) Problem Statement and Motivation Technical Approach Key Achievements and Future Goals Need to identify unknown virus sequences during events such as epidemic or biological warfare We only have a database of known virus sequences Few complications of the real-world problem: Sequence has mutated (possibly maliciously) Impossibility to obtain entire DNA sequence Sample may be contaminated and/or contains mixture of sequences. Rapid amplification of the collected genetic material, e.g., via degenerate oligonucleotide primer based multiplex PCR A pathogen fingerprinting and/or barcoding component built around universal DNA tag arrays Rapid and robust computational procedures to compute barcodes that produces short signatures of sequences Two possible approaches to design FiRPaDS: Target based FiRPaDS Primer based FiRPaDS Developed efficient barcoding algorithms using combinatorial techniques Will extend barcoding approaches for more complicated scenarios such as mixture of samples Will generate an efficient solution for a combinatorial or graph-theoretic formulation for the degenerate multiplexed PCR minimization problem Will investigate applications of universal DNA tag arrays for helpful coordination with barcoding or fingerprinting steps