BCCI - A Bidirectional Cortical Communication Interface

Therapeutic methods based on efferent signals from the patients’ brain have been studied extensively in the field of brain-computer interfaces and applied to paralysed and stroke patients. Invasive stimulation is used as a therapeutic tool for patients with Parkinson disease, intractable chronic pain and other neurological diseases. We give a short review of currently used applications for cortical stimulation for stroke patients and braincomputer interfaces for paralyzed patients. We propose a refined approach for stroke rehabilitation as well as the extension of the use of invasive cortical stimulation to ALS patients with an experimental setup inspired by classical conditioning to facilitate the communication with brain-computer interfaces for LIS and CLIS patients. A closed-loop system is described with sophisticated methods for the identification of recording and stimulation sites, feature extraction and adaptation of stimulation algorithms to the patient in order to design a bidirectional cortical communication interface (BCCI).