Neural prosthetics

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cybermed2424

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If anyone is familiar, I'm curious as to how much neurology is involved in neural prosthetics and other spine injury tech. Is it mostly just a PMR/neurosurgery driven field, or are there neurologists out there playing a role?

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You're going to have to be a little more specific. There really are no true neural prosthetics currently in clinical use. There is the device developed by Todd Kuiken's lab, who I believe is a PM&R doc, that uses preserved proximal muscle activity (such as pectoralis) to drive robotic limbs in amputees. There are other exoskeleton like devices, but not in widespread clinical use. None of these are true neural prosthetics in that they do not connect directly to the brain or spinal cord. If a true neural prosthetic was created that was clinically useful, then all 3 of these specialties would likely be involved. You might read the post further down on "Neuralink" which discusses some similar ideas.
 
This is a biomedical engineering field right now bordering on science fiction. Clinicians (whether neurosurgeons, neurologists or PMR) have no role at the moment or within the near future.
 
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