neurology

Testing for strokes can be inaccurate and expensive. But a new device that looks like a pair of swimming goggles may offer a better, cheaper alternative, and save tens of thousands of lives every year.

The goggles, equipped with an infrared camera attached to a cord that goes to a laptop computer, measure eye movements, Dr. David Newman-Toker, an associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained on "CBS This Morning."

"The eye movements (when) patients present with strokes in the back part of the brain -- and that's about one out of every four strokes -- the patients present with dizziness and vertigo and we can tell from their eye movements whether they've had a stroke or whether they have a benign inner-ear condition, quickly and easily," said Newman-Toker, who is leading the study of the new technique.

The goggles will work best as strokes occur, Newman-Toker said, and will likely find use in emergency rooms. … Read more

For some people, touching a touch screen is difficult, if not impossible.

According to Georgia Tech, more than 200,000 kids in the U.S. public school system have some sort of orthopedic disability that hinders them from experiencing the vast information that awaits them on a tablet or smartphone. Children with neurological disorders -- such as muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and spina bifida -- can also have difficulty using touch-screen devices due to motor skill impairments.

The need to counteract this limitation inspired Ayanna Howard, a Georgia Tech engineering professor, and graduate student Hae Won Park to create Access4Kids, a prototype assistive device that could level the playing field.… Read more

Are the deepest secrets of your mind safe? Could thieves trick you into revealing your bank card PIN or computer passwords just by thinking about them?

Theoretically, it could happen.

Ivan Martinovic of the University of Oxford and colleagues at the University of Geneva and University of California at Berkeley describe research into that question in a paper entitled "On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks With Brain-Computer Interfaces" presented earlier this month at the 21st USENIX Security Symposium.

The research was inspired by the growing number of games and other mind apps available for low-cost consumer EEG devices such as Emotiv's EPOC headset, which lets users interact with computers using their thoughts alone. … Read more

Though YouTube shouldn't exactly be your most trusted source of medical advice, in at least one case, videos on the site can help people manage a common form of vertigo without having to see a doctor, according to researchers from the American Academy of Neurology.

However, as is the case with pretty much any aggregator on the Internet (think Wikipedia), one should proceed with a healthy dose of caution, because just over half the videos are accurate -- which means, of course, that the others aren't.

The researchers who reviewed YouTube videos of the Epley maneuver, which can … Read more

Woody Allen famously said, "My brain. It's my second favorite organ."

Even if the brain falls below second on your own favorite-organ hierarchy (personally, I really like my spleen), it's hard not to be struck by its mystery and complexity.

An exhibit running at the Wellcome Collection in London through June 17, "Brains: The mind as matter," takes a unique approach to the subject.

Rather than focusing on the hard science of neurons, lobes, and dura, the exhibit explores how humans have related to the brain over time -- how it's been studied … Read more

GE and Mayo Clinic announce today that they are the recipients of a five-year, $5.7 million research grant to study and develop a dedicated MRI brain scanner to image a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including stroke, depression, and autism.

"A smaller, lighter, dedicated head-only MRI system will have a huge positive impact on the field of psychiatry," said Steve Williams, head of the Department of Neuroimaging at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, in a news release. "During the past decade, brain imaging research has dramatically improved our understanding of mental … Read more

Any time someone concatenates the words "Paul Allen," "brain," and "science" in one sentence, two assumptions can safely be made: What's being described will be expensive; what's being described will be newsworthy.

And so it comes as little surprise that the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science announced this week a world first: a highly detailed guide to both the anatomy and the genes of the human brain that includes 1,000 anatomical landmarks backed by 100 million data points measuring the strength of gene activity at each landmark. The cost of … Read more

It all started in 2006, when researchers were studying a young woman considered to be in a vegetative state. Using MRI to scan her brain, they asked her to imagine herself playing tennis and touring her own home, and found that her brain behaved in much the way a normally functioning brain does.

The neuroscientists were shocked into action as news of what may have only been an anomaly prompted families to ask that the researchers study their own loved ones, too.

One of the neuroscientists, Adrian Owen at the University of Cambridge, alongside colleagues at the University of Liege … Read more

A robot using biological brain matter from rodents to control its movements is helping researchers learn more about human neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, according to University of Reading researchers in the U.K.

The robot represents a multidisciplinary effort within the University of Reading, whose team includes Kevin Warwick, head of Cybernetics in the School of Systems Engineering, and Ben Whalley, pharmacist and professor in the School of Pharmacy.

The neuron culture being used to control the robot operates from what is essentially a sophisticated, temperature-controlled Petri dish with electrodes called a multi electrode array (MEA).

The MEA, in which the delicate brain matter is kept in an incubated environment and fed, consists of 60 electrodes. After about one to two weeks of growth, the brain matter is mature enough to start learning and use the MEA to communicate with the robot. The MEA both stimulates the brain matter by sending electrical signals to it and responds to the electrical impulses sent out by the cultured neurons.

"We feed them every couple of days, a pink liquid with nutrients not too dissimilar to what the Olympians might drink for energy," Warwick said in a phone interview. "It keeps the neurons alive and allows them to grow. Within 24 hours they make connections. Within a week there is a brain-like activity. If you stimulate one electrode you get spontaneous firing. We then use that basic operation by linking it up to the robot body."

The electrical output from the brain received by the MEA is transferred to the robot via ultrasonic sonar. The sonar signal causes the robot's wheels to move forward, left, or right, depending on the signal. In return, the brain is sent signals to stimulate it when it nears an object in the hopes that it will respond to avoid colliding with it.… Read more