Paralysis is a rather terrible condition in which part of, so to speak, "physiological" functions becomes uncontrollable for a person, despite the fact that at the level of the central nervous system everything can be in order. Scientists have been fighting over the treatment of this condition for more than a year and, quite possibly, a solution to one of the problems associated with the loss of the ability to speak has been found. After all, a way has recently been developed to convert brain impulses into speech signals. And artificial intelligence helped in this.
According to the editors of Science, researchers from the Netherlands, Germany and the United States, using computational models based on neural networks, reconstructed words and sentences by reading signals from the brain. To do this, they observed areas of the brain in those moments when people were reading aloud, making a speech, or just listening to the tapes.
In their work, the experts relied on data obtained from five people with epilepsy. The network analyzed the "behavior" of the auditory cortex (which is active both during speech and listening). Then the computer reconstructed the speech data from the pulses received from these people. As a result, the algorithm coped with an accuracy of 75%.
Another team of scientists, led by neuroscientists Miguel Angrik of the University of Bremen in Germany and Christian Herf of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, drew on data from six people who underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor. The microphone picked up their voices as they read individual words aloud. At this time, the electrodes recorded information from the speech centers of the brain. The network matched the electrode readings with the audio recordings. As a result, about 40% of the data was recognized correctly.
A third team from the University of California, San Francisco reconstructed entire sentences based on brain counts from three epileptic patients who read specific sentences aloud. Some sentences were correctly identified more than 80% of the time.
Despite the very good results, the system is still at an early stage and needs additional refinement. But if all goes well, hundreds of thousands of people around the world may again be able to speak.
Vladimir Kuznetsov