Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have developed a flexible, flowerlike device that can be inserted through a tiny hole in the skull and attached to the brain to help treat conditions like epilepsy.
“Minimally invasive neurotechnologies are essential approaches to offer efficient, patient-tailored therapies,” Stephanie Lacour, director of the EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics, said in a news release. “We needed to design a miniaturized electrode array capable of folding, passing through a small hole in the skull and then deploying in a flat surface resting over the cortex.”
The technology combines soft bioelectronics and soft robotics, creating an extremely thin device with six spiral-shaped arms. The arms start off inverted inside a cylindrical tube and deploy once the array has reached its target, allowing it to cover a 4 cm surface area — double the 2 cm diameter of the hole it’s passed through. It rests within a space only about 1 mm in width between the skull and the brain.
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