Cerebral basis for volitional movement and cortical neural prosthetics.

Our research is centered on two aspects of motor control: cerebral mechanisms of volitional arm movement and cortical control of neural prosthetics. We use electrode arrays to record action potentials from populations of individual neurons in motor cortical areas while monkeys perform tasks related to reaching and drawing and a variety of hand movements. A number of signal-processing and statistical analyses are performed on these data to extract movement-related information from the recorded activity. We are currently developing prostheses capable of restoring reaching, grasping and manipulation to immobilized individuals.

Sample Publications:

Behavioral and neural correlates of visuomotor adaptation observed through a brain-computer interface in primary motor cortex.
Chase SM, Kass RE, Schwartz AB.
J Neurophysiol. 2012 Apr 11.

Recording from the same neurons chronically in motor cortex.
Fraser GW, Schwartz AB.
J Neurophysiol. 2011 Dec 21.

Inference from populations: going beyond models.
Chase SM, Schwartz AB.
Prog Brain Res. 2011;192:103-12.

Latent inputs improve estimates of neural encoding in motor cortex.
Chase SM, Schwartz AB, Kass RE.
J Neurosci. 2010 Oct 13;30(41):13873-82.

A reward-modulated hebbian learning rule can explain experimentally observed network reorganization in a brain control task.
Legenstein R, Chase SM, Schwartz AB, Maass W.
J Neurosci. 2010 Jun 23;30(25):8400-10.

Control of a brain-computer interface without spike sorting.
Fraser GW, Chase SM, Whitford A, Schwartz AB.
J Neural Eng. 2009 Oct;6(5):055004.

Population vector code: a geometric universal as actuator.
van Hemmen JL and Schwartz AB.
Biol. Cybern. (2008) 98:509-518.

Cortical control of a prosthetic arm for self-feeding.
Velliste M, Perel S, Spalding MC, Whitford AS and Schwartz AB.
Nature (2008) 453:1098-1101.

Useful signals from motor cortex.
Schwartz AB.
J. Physiology (2007) Mar 15;579 (Pt3):581-601.

Statistical signal processing and the motor cortex.
Brockwell AE, Kass RE and Schwartz AB.
Proc. IEEE. (2007) 95:881-898.

Brain controlled interfaces: Movement restoration with neural prosthetics.
Schwartz AB, Cui XT, Weber DJ and Moran DW.
Neuron (2006) Oct 5; 52 (1): 205-20.

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