David Baillot / UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering


Electronics


Off grid


Neurosurgeons have always had steady hands. Soon they might have precise navigation tools to go with them. Isabel Ellis speaks to Shadi Dayeh, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California San Diego, and Ahmed Raslan, associate professor of neurological surgery at Oregon Health and Science University, to find out what goes into creating their new electrocorticography grids, and how they improve upon the current standard of care in hospitals.


hey have helped save and improve countless lives, but the devices currently used to map brains for resection still look disconcertingly like they have been cut out from a Sunday newspaper’s brainteaser page – as if Hannibal Lecter had his own pulsating spin on Sudoku. Electrocorticography (ECoG) grids, as these tools are called, consist of numbered electrical contacts spaced 1cm apart. Placed directly onto the surface of a patient’s brain, they’re used to detect and isolate the locations of different cognitive domains or


T Medical Device Developments / www.nsmedicaldevices.com


functions. Surgery teams employ them in working out how to remove brain tumours without permanently damaging faculties like language, memory or motor control. The numbers – or sometimes letters – are used as reference points to note approximately where those functions reside in individual patients.


Approximately is the operative word there. The 1cm2


separating each sensor equates to a very low- resolution image, so neurosurgeons have to work with a linear extrapolation of the irregular


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