• device
• intervention
• stent
• technology

Once the domain of science fiction, the study of brain computer interfaces (BCIs) has steadily become a topic of significant rigorous scientific inquiry, with exponential growth over the last two decades of published peer-reviewed articles. BCI is a computer-based system that acquires, analyzes and translates brain signals into commands that are relayed to an output device to carry out a desired function.1 The recent JNIS publication by Oxley et al2 describes the first in human experience with a minimally invasive, fully-implanted, wireless, ambulatory motor neuroprosthesis using an endovascular stent-electrode array to transmit electrocorticography signals from the motor cortex to a digital device translator which controls an output device. There has already been significant mainstream media coverage of this publication for good reason. For neurointerventionalists, this advance in BCI sensor technology is significant because it begins to show the feasibility of using the cerebral venous system to access robust subdural brain electrocorticography signals.

BCI has for decades been limited to either scalp-recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signals or intracortical EEG. Scalp EEG has the advantages of being safe, easy and inexpensive to acquire. But scalp EEG electrical signals are attenuated because of the dura, skull and scalp, potentially losing important information. Intracortical or cortical surface recordings can record local field potentials with higher amplitude than EEG with superior spatial resolution, spectral bandwidth, and higher frequency activity (gamma band) not seen with scalp EEG. Until recently, the need for a craniotomy to access these signals was a significant limitation in …