2025-03-05 復旦大学
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After undergoing a minimally invasive brain-spine interface (BSI) surgery at HuaShan Hospital Fudan University on March 3, a patient paralyzed for two years due to a spinal cord injury regained movement in his legs yesterday.
This marks another successful case for Professor JIA Fumin’s team at Fudan’s Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence (ISTBI), following their collaboration with ZhongShan Hospital Fudan University to complete the world’s first three proof-of-concept (PoC) surgeries from January to February 2024. This achievement also heralds a new era of neural functional reconstruction.
Thanks to the world’s first “triple-integrated brain-spine interface technology” developed by Jia’s team, the patient with the surname Lin became the world’s first total paraplegia to restore walking ability through minimally invasive BSI technology.
Two years ago, Lin sustained severe spinal injuries and a brain hemorrhage after falling from a 4-meter-high staircase. The injury severed the neural connection between the brain and the spinal cord segment responsible for walking, rendering his legs completely non-functional and confining him to a wheelchair.
Jia’s team constructed a nerve bypass between the brain and spinal cord with AI assistance by implanting electrodes in a four-hour procedure for Lin. After undergoing the minimally invasive BSI surgery at ZhongShan Hospital, he regained leg movement within 24 hours post-operation.
“The therapeutic outcomes for these paraplegic patients met or even surpassed our expectations, preliminarily validating the feasibility of this next-generation BSI solution,” said Jia, “the completion of the four surgeries across two hospitals demonstrates the technology’s reproducibility and scalability. This is not just a technological triumph but a new beginning for paralyzed patients.”
Throughout the project, Jia’s team engaged in extensive interdisciplinary collaboration with experts in neurology, neurosurgery, rehabilitation medicine, and radiology to meticulously refine the PoC surgery.
He’s also planning to conduct further BSI clinical PoC studies with ZhongShan Hospital, HuaShan Hospital, and other institutions to gather real-world data and improve algorithms, and to accelerate the translation of this groundbreaking technology, offering new hope to the 20 million spinal cord injury patients worldwide.
