Dhillon Gurpreet Singh, Horch Kenneth W
Michael E DeBakey Department of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2005 Dec;13(4):468-72. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2005.856072.
Evidence indicates that user acceptance of modern artificial limbs by amputees would be significantly enhanced by a system that provides appropriate, graded, distally referred sensations of touch and joint movement, and that the functionality of limb prostheses would be improved by a more natural control mechanism. We have recently demonstrated that it is possible to implant electrodes within individual fascicles of peripheral nerve stumps in amputees, that stimulation through these electrodes can produce graded, discrete sensations of touch or movement referred to the amputee's phantom hand, and that recordings of motor neuron activity associated with attempted movements of the phantom limb through these electrodes can be used as graded control signals. We report here that this approach allows amputees to both judge and set grip force and joint position in an artificial arm, in the absence of visual input, thus providing a substrate for better integration of the artificial limb into the amputee's body image. We believe this to be the first demonstration of direct neural feedback from and direct neural control of an artificial arm in amputees.
有证据表明，对于截肢者而言，一个能够提供适当的、分级的、向远端传导的触觉和关节运动感觉的系统，将显著提高他们对现代假肢的接受度；并且，一种更自然的控制机制将改善肢体假肢的功能。我们最近证实，有可能在截肢者的外周神经残端的单个束内植入电极，通过这些电极进行刺激能够产生分级的、离散的触觉或运动感觉，并传导至截肢者的幻肢，而且通过这些电极记录与幻肢尝试运动相关的运动神经元活动，可作为分级控制信号。我们在此报告，这种方法使截肢者在没有视觉输入的情况下，能够判断并设定假臂的握力和关节位置，从而为将假肢更好地整合到截肢者的身体意象中提供了基础。我们认为这是首次在截肢者中展示来自假臂的直接神经反馈以及对假臂的直接神经控制。
