In this talk, Dr. Schwartz will discuss the use of population coding to extract behavioral intention encoded by groups of individual neurons recorded from monkeys performing natural tasks.  With these extraction techniques, we can visualize patterns indicative of network organization along with detailed real-time kinematics of the ongoing behavioral output.  This allows us to use the extracted signal to control a robotic arm, wrist and hand in a realistic grasp-to-reach task.

Dr. Schwartz received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1984. He then went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he worked with Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos, who was developing the concept of directional tuning and population-based movement representation in the motor cortex. In 1988, Dr. Schwartz began his independent research career at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. There, he developed a paradigm to explore the continuous cortical signals generated throughout volitional arm movements. This was done using monkeys trained to draw shapes while recording single-cell activity from their motor cortices. After developing the ability to capture a high fidelity representation of movement intention from the motor cortex, Dr. Schwartz teamed up with engineering colleagues at Arizona State University to develop cortical neural prosthetics. The work has progressed to the point that monkeys can now use these recorded signals to control motorized arm prostheses to reach out grasp a piece of food and return it to the mouth. Dr. Schwartz moved from the Barrow Neurological Institute to the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego in 1995 and then to the University of Pittsburgh in 2002, where he is a Professor of Neurobiology. In addition to the prosthetics work, he continues to use systems approaches to study basic mechanisms of volitional performance.

Nature报道: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/abs/nature06996.html

网络视频http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/multimedia.php

新浪科技http://tech.sina.com.cn/d/2008-05-29/13162225149.shtml