STTR Phase I: Portable Ultra-Resolution EEG for Improved Diagnosis and Treatment of Brain Disorders: Instrumentation and Algorithms

This SBIR Phase I project will advance novel techniques for developing high-resolution noninvasive brain imaging systems, capable of recording unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution inferences of the brain activity for a portable system. These systems leverage novel fundamental analysis and results, and experimental demonstrations, that show that spatial resolution of Electroencephalography (EEG) is not saturated at densities of a few hundred electrodes, unlike what has been widely believed in clinical and neuroscience community. They also build on recent work by the PIs that enables faster and reliable acquisition of EEG signals. The success of the proposed work will help diagnose worsening brain injuries before the injury occurs. Brain injuries affect 1.7 million Americans every year. Commercially, it will enable higher resolution brain-machine interfaces for applications such as virtual reality interfacing and neuroprostheses, generating novel avenues for jobs and revenue through creation of an entirely new industry. This transdisciplinary effort brings together neuroscientists and engineers and the concepts developed in this effort will inform material for basic neuroscience and neuroengineering courses. The team will continue to publish and publicize their work at clinical conferences. One of the core employees will be a minority female who has contributed to the research, guided several other minority (and non-minority) female students, and now wants to lead the development end of this project. This effort builds a systematic platform that challenges the widely held belief that increasing electrode-densities of EEG to beyond a few hundred electrodes does not improve spatial resolution. There are several problems with the traditional EEG that the platform overcomes: (i) typically only 9-32 electrodes are used for clinical diagnoses and these are fundamentally limited to only providing poor spatial resolution; (ii) because traditional EEGs have low resolution, surgical treatments often require invasive procedures. E.g., for diagnosing severity or worsening of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) by measuring parameters of cortical spreading depolarizations (CSDs), which are mediators of worsening brain injuries; (iii) long-term EEG measurements are cumbersome, and high-density systems can take hours of manual labor to install. The PIs' preliminary work provides strong evidence supporting the claim that ultra-high-density EEG will provide the first non-invasive and portable modality for high spatial and temporal resolution brain imaging. Novel brain-imaging algorithms will be developed and benchmarked against existing techniques and assessed using novel fundamental limits. Novel techniques will be deployed in the design of conductive sponges and in lowering power, enabling the platform to be portable and usable over long term. These improvements will be rigorously tested through simulations, experiments, and real data analysis. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.