We also found good decoding performance from individual brain regions. This suggests that we could move our decoder from fMRI into more portable systems. The best regions differed across participants so we think fMRI will remain very important for localizing recording sites
7/8
Moving forward we hope to develop practical systems that can support communication. We found that decoding performance reliably improved with the amount of training data. So we’re optimistic that there's plenty of room for improvement
6/8
Next we explored why this works. We found that conceptual processing was largely spared outside of damaged brain regions. This suggests that our approach could generalize across patients with a wide range of lesion profiles and speech / language impairments
5/8
Aphasia is one of the most common and debilitating effects of stroke. Patients with aphasia struggle with different aspects of language (e.g. word finding, grammatical construction, phonological encoding). But many patients have relatively spared conceptual knowledge
2/8
We're excited to share our new study on decoding brain activity in participants with post-stroke aphasia! We think this is an important step towards cognitive brain-computer interfaces for patients with language disorders
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/8
We found that the decoder predictions could describe what the participants with aphasia were hearing about / seeing / imagining! This shows how brain-computer interfaces could predict the concepts that patients are thinking about but struggling to express
4/8
This was an incredibly rewarding project to work on. Thanks to the amazing team that made this possible! Carly Millanski, Allison Chen, Lisa Wauters, Jordyn Anders, Shilpa Shamapant, @smwilson.bsky.social, @alexanderhuth.bsky.social, @mayalhenry.bsky.social
8/8
We previously showed that concepts can be decoded from neurologically healthy participants using functional MRI. Here we used a transfer learning approach where decoders are trained on neurologically healthy participants and then transferred to participants with aphasia using stories and movies 3/8