International team to develop advanced brain probe

Working with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and University College London (UCL), the Belgian nanoelectronics centre said the proposed sensor array will advance current neural probe technology used to detect extracellular electrical activity in the brain.

It is claimed the solution will incorporate recording electrodes at a much higher density and provide an order of magnitude better performance than existing technology, allowing researchers to record brain activity with ‘unprecedented combination’ of resolution and ability to record from a very large number of sites.

Furthermore, Imec claims sensor arrays will have the potential to enable transformational neurobiology experiments and contribute to a fundamentally improved understanding of how neurons in the brain work together to process information and control behaviour.

In doing so, these new probes will address the basic understanding of brain function, such as how sensory information, visual images in the eye or whisker touches, flows into and between brain regions, and is processed by the cortex.