Maryam Shanechi

A brain-machine-interface (BMI) is a system that interacts with the brain either to allow the brain to control an external device or to control the brain's state. While these two BMI types are for different applications, they can both be viewed as closed-loop control systems. In this talk I present our work on developing both these types of BMIs, specifically motor BMIs for restoring movement in paralyzed patients, a BMI for control of the brain state under anesthesia, and finally a new BMI for control of the brain’s neuropsychiatric state. Motor BMIs have largely used standard signal processing techniques. However, devising novel algorithmic solutions that are tailored to the neural system can significantly improve the performance of these BMIs. 

Here, I develop a novel BMI paradigm for restoration of motor function that incorporates an optimal feedback-control model of the brain and directly processes the spiking activity using point process modeling. I show that this paradigm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in closed-loop primate experiments. In addition to motor BMIs, I construct a new BMI that controls the brain’s anesthetic state using adaptive stochastic controllers that adjust the real-time rate of drug administration based on EEG observations. I show the reliable performance of this BMI in rodent experiments. Finally, I show some of our recent results on developing a BMI for closed-loop electrical stimulation to treat neuropsychiatric disorders in human patients. I construct dynamic state-space models that accurately predict high-dimensional neural activity recorded from the human brain, and input-output system identification algorithms that describe the effect of electrical stimulation on neural activity.

Biography:

Maryam Shanechi is an assistant professor and the Viterbi Early Career Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). Prior to joining USC, she was an assistant professor at Cornell University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She received the B.A.Sc. degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto in 2004 and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2006 and 2011, respectively. She held postdoctoral positions at Harvard Medical School and at UC Berkeley from 2011-2013. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Technology Review’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35 (TR35), the Popular Science Brilliant 10, an inaugural Cal-BRAIN award, and the NAE FOE invitation.

Maryam Shanechi

Biography: