Progress in Neuroengineering for brain repair: New challenges and open issues

TLDR

Biomedical devices are increasingly used to treat neurological disorders, but effective therapy requires a multidisciplinary neuroengineering approach that integrates neuroscience and engineering to read and manipulate the neural code. This review emphasizes the need to develop new neurotechnological devices for brain repair and outlines the major challenges anticipated in the coming years. The authors survey brain‑repair strategies in basic and clinical research and discuss recent artificial‑intelligence advances that could enhance these devices. They argue that neuroengineering will become central to future clinical brain‑repair applications, highlighting ethical considerations and the growing convergence of biology and AI.

Abstract

Background: In recent years, biomedical devices have proven to be able to target also different neurological disorders. Given the rapid ageing of the population and the increase of invalidating diseases affecting the central nervous system, there is a growing demand for biomedical devices of immediate clinical use. However, to reach useful therapeutic results, these tools need a multidisciplinary approach and a continuous dialogue between neuroscience and engineering, a field that is named neuroengineering. This is because it is fundamental to understand how to read and perturb the neural code in order to produce a significant clinical outcome. Results: In this review, we first highlight the importance of developing novel neurotechnological devices for brain repair and the major challenges expected in the next years. We describe the different types of brain repair strategies being developed in basic and clinical research and provide a brief overview of recent advances in artificial intelligence that have the potential to improve the devices themselves. We conclude by providing our perspective on their implementation to humans and the ethical issues that can arise. Conclusions: Neuroengineering approaches promise to be at the core of future developments for clinical applications in brain repair, where the boundary between biology and artificial intelligence will become increasingly less pronounced.