Stabilizing brain-computer interfaces through alignment of latent dynamics

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) restore motor function to people with paralysis by translating brain activity into control signals for external devices. In current iBCIs, instabilities at the neural interface result in a degradation of decoding performance, which necessitates frequent supervised recalibration using new labeled data. One potential solution is to use the latent manifold structure that underlies neural population activity to facilitate a stable mapping between brain activity and behavior. Recent efforts using unsupervised approaches have improved iBCI stability using this principle; however, existing methods treat each time step as an independent sample and do not account for latent dynamics. Dynamics have been used to enable high performance prediction of movement intention, and may also help improve stabilization. Here, we present a platform for Nonlinear Manifold Alignment with Dynamics (NoMAD), which stabilizes iBCI decoding using recurrent neural netwo..., Human Participant Details 
Participant T11 had two 96-channel intracortical microelectrode arrays (Blackrock Microsystems, Salt Lake City, Utah) placed chronically into the left precentral gyrus (PCG) as part of the BrainGate pilot clinical trial (www.ClinicalTrials.gov; Identifier: NCT00912041). Permission for this study was granted by the U.S. FDA (Investigational Device Exemption #G090003) and the IRBs of Massachusetts General Hospital, Providence VA Medical Center, and Brown University. The participant gave informed consent to the study and resulting publications. This data has been previously published in Rubin, et al., J Neurosci 2022.
Human Data Acquisition 
During recording, neural activity was recorded at 30kHz from 192 channels and processed using a custom signal processing system. After digital downsampling, threshold crossing events were extracted in real time using 20 ms time-steps. 
Human iBCI Experimental Paradigm 
The participant first completed a cen..., , # Data from: Stabilizing brain-computer interfaces through alignment of latent dynamics

## Files and variables

Each file is saved in Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) format with time series data stored as acquisition fields and trial information stored in the trials field. 

#### Acquisitions

* **binned_spikes**: threshold crossings aggregated in 20ms bins for 192 channels
* **cursor_pos**: continuous cursor position in the x- and y-directions 
* **target_pos**: the x- and y- positions of the centers of the cued target
* **cursor_vel**: continuous cursor velocity in the x- and y- directions
* **block_num**: the identity of the block that each data point was collected in during the research session
* **cond_id**: for simplicity, the condition identity corresponding to the instructed target location (one condition per possible target)

#### Trials

In addition to start and stop times, each trial contains the following fields:

* **cond_id**: condition identity for a given trial
* **tgt_..., The participant gave informed consent to the study and resulting publications. Data is de-identified as no personally identifiable information is included, subject is referred to using a codified identifier, and fewer than three indirect identifiers are included.