An Expandable Brain-Machine Interface Enabled by Origami Materials and Structures for Tracking Epileptic Traveling Waves

Abstract

Tracking neural activities across multiple brain regions remains a daunting challenge due to the non-negligible skull injuries during implantations of large-area electrocorticography (ECoG) grids and the limited spatial accessibility of conventional rectilinear depth probes. Here, a multiregion Brain-machine Interface (BMI) is proposed comprising an expandable bio-inspired origami ECoG electrode covering cortical areas larger than the cranial window, and an expandable origami depth probe capable of reaching multiple deep brain regions beyond a single implantation axis. Using the proposed BMI, it is observed that, in rat models of focal seizures, cortical multiband epileptiform activities mainly manifest as expanding traveling waves outward from a cortical source.