Researchers at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have developed a brain prosthesis that is designed to help individuals suffering from memory loss. The prosthesis includes a small array of electrodes implanted into the brain.

The engineering team accurately found a way to mimic how a memory is translated from short-term memory into long-term memory, using data obtained first from animals, and then from humans. The prosthesis bypasses a damaged hippocampal section and provides the next region of the brain with the correctly translated memory.

“It’s like being able to translate from Spanish to French without being able to understand either language,” said researcher Ted Berger.

The effectiveness of the model was tested by the USC and Wake Forest Baptist researchers. With the permission of patients who had electrodes implanted in their hippocampi to treat chronic seizures, the engineers read the electrical signals created during memory formation at two regions of the hippocampus.

The team then fed those signals into the model and determined how the signals generated from the first region of the hippocampus were translated into signals generated by the second region of the hippocampus.

In hundreds of trials conducted with nine patients, the algorithm accurately predicted how the signals would be translated, with about 90 percent accuracy.

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