High-density Electrodes

Researchers developed a reconfigurable microelectrode array chip with 24,576 electrodes that supports neurotransmitter-related chemical sensing and neural current recording on the same hardware platform. Experiments demonstrated single-electrode electrochemical sensing, quantitative dopamine detection in prepared solution, and dynamic electrochemical imaging. The team also recorded spontaneous extracellular biocurrent from primary neurons. Chemical and electrical recording support 24 and 384 simultaneous output channels, respectively, rather than simultaneous readout from every electrode. The authors propose the platform for studying interactions between chemical and electrical signaling; the reported validation is at the sample and cellular levels.

Precision Neuroscience announced a human central nervous system atlas combining high-resolution surface electrical recordings from 70 patients at 12 academic medical centers. It spans multiple cortical regions as well as brainstem and spinal cord structures. The company says the atlas includes more than 180 hours of synchronized neural and behavioral data and demonstrates motor decoding, spoken-word classification, and classification of eight facial expressions. The manuscript describes a 70-patient cohort; the broader total of patients implanted with the company's system had surpassed 100 by the announcement. These are distinct counts. The findings were disclosed by the company in connection with a preprint that has not been peer reviewed.

Precision Neuroscience closed an oversubscribed $250 million Series D co-led by Pershing Square Inc., the Ackman Oxman Institute and an undisclosed life sciences fund, bringing its total raised since 2021 to $430 million. The company says it has completed more than 100 patient procedures at 18 medical institutions and holds FDA clearance for its Layer 7 Cortical Interface, a thin-film electrode array placed on the brain surface. It plans to use the money to expand clinical work, move Layer 7 through the next stages of FDA review and build out commercialization.

Training a decoder to read brain signals usually means collecting a large labeled dataset from every new subject, which is slow and a burden on patients. The proposed method, MAPA, first runs self-supervised pretraining on unlabeled intracranial EEG recordings pooled across subjects, then transfers to new ones. The difficulty is that electrode contact placement and neuroanatomy vary from person to person, so MAPA adds two spatial encodings, an anatomical region embedding and a relative positional encoding, to a standard masked autoencoder. In cross-subject tests, about 164 labeled trials were enough to reach the accuracy that otherwise takes 3,500. The team reports that MAPA set new best results on the Neuroprobe benchmark in all three settings, within-session, cross-session and cross-subject, without fine-tuning, suggesting that calibration for implanted BCIs could become much shorter.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor have built SpikeCleaner, an algorithm that grades neural units after automated spike sorting, reaching 97% accuracy and a 92% F1 score on single units in benchmarking. It combines spike rate, spike-timing metrics and waveform features to classify units as good, noise or multi-unit activity, a job that otherwise falls to manual curation.

Researchers writing in npj Biomedical Innovations have proposed DSTF-Net, a framework that decodes steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) from frontal EEG alone, removing the need for electrodes over the occipital cortex. In cross-subject transfer to 20 new users, including eight brain-injured patients lying supine, it improved decoding accuracy by as much as 33.47% over baseline methods.

Placing electrodes on the brain's surface rather than inserting them into tissue is the key difference between Precision Neuroscience's approach and the BrainGate approach Donoghue pioneered. The New York-based company develops minimally invasive, safely removable, high-bandwidth BCIs; its first system, Layer 7, is aimed at people with ALS, spinal cord injury and brainstem stroke, a population the company estimates at 315,000 in the US. The company says its Layer 7 cortical surface array has been implanted in nearly 100 patients at several leading academic medical centers, that it has raised $180 million from investors, and that it has received FDA 510(k) clearance. Donoghue, a professor emeritus at Brown University, will advise on device design, signal decoding and clinical strategy as the company pushes ahead with a long-term implant study and commercial launch.

A post from SpikeGadgets surveys how far multichannel electrophysiology has scaled: its Modular Stacking Headstage supports chronic recording of 1,024 channels across 10 brain regions; the University of Pittsburgh's MePhys platform uses 992 electrode contacts to cover an entire macaque hemisphere; and a Rice University preprint describes a custom ASIC that supports 5,376 simultaneous recording channels.

Researchers have built a 32-channel event-based analog front-end chip in 180 nm CMOS that encodes biosignals in two modes, pulse frequency modulation and adaptive asynchronous delta modulation. The chip retunes its output data rate in real time to the envelope of the incoming signal, giving high compression and, the authors argue, a route to wireless transmission and online processing of neural signals in brain-computer interfaces.

Researchers at Coherence Neuro Global, Inc. and other institutions have used implanted neural interfaces to track glioma growth in freely behaving mice over time. Across several mouse strains and glioma models, tumor progression went with elevated gamma-band activity in the tumor microenvironment, and machine learning models read tumor burden off the chronic recordings, with gamma trajectories predicting individual growth rates. The work was posted to bioRxiv on July 9, 2026, and has not been peer reviewed.

A collaborative study involving authors from Hangzhou Dianzi University and other institutions developed a three-dimensional helical stretchable neural probe and achieved 1024-channel signal acquisition in the pig cerebral cortex. The researchers also report single-unit recordings with long-term stability in the mouse deep brain, while flexible planar microelectrode arrays recorded subcutaneous EMG signals in mice. The probe is fabricated using planar microfabrication followed by thermally driven helical shaping, expanding wiring space and accommodating tissue motion. Mechanical simulations and cyclic stretching tests examined strain mitigation and electrochemical stability, respectively. These device and animal results do not establish long-term performance in humans.

Published in Cell Reports Methods on June 12, 2026, the study presents high-density micro-electrocorticography arrays that integrate silicone elastomers (optical transparency, repeated penetration with intracortical arrays) and polyimide films (fine photolithographic feature definition) for multi-scale studies of brain activity. The combination facilitates high-throughput functional mapping to identify targets and insertion of intracortical arrays for dense local sampling. The authors demonstrated functional mapping in rats, cats and marmosets, guiding multi-area laminar recordings, and demonstrated local and feedforward optogenetic stimulation to investigate cortico-cortical interactions.

A Neurosurgical Focus paper tested Precision Neuroscience's 1,024-channel Layer 7 micro-ECoG array in four awake-craniotomy patients. Four-word speech classification reached 77.5% accuracy and four-direction cursor classification reached 78% to 84%, with no device-related adverse events reported during the procedures. The small, short intraoperative study was a feasibility test rather than a pivotal motor-restoration trial.

A Neuron paper describes Neuropixels Ultra, which packs 6,144 switchable recording sites at 6-micrometer center-to-center spacing while reading 384 channels simultaneously. In mouse visual cortex recordings, neuronal yield increased by more than twofold. The study also improved subcellular signal detection and cell-type classification, but it did not report simultaneous recording from 10,000 neurons.