(April 4, 2017) It’s becoming increasingly clear the relationship between the brain and processing of tactile stimuli, which help to understand and decode the outside world. A joint research between BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa and Faculty of Medicine, University of Lund (Sweden), published today, April 4, in Scientific Reports magazine, reveals a fundamental mechanism for the processing of tactile stimuli in the brain. The future potential biomedical applications of this finding in humans ranging from the development of more sophisticated and functional neuroprostheses (systems that decode brain signals and transmit them to a robotic limb engine to replace an amputee limb and simultaneously send nerve signals to the brain to return the sense of touch), to the understanding of the genesis of neurological diseases, to the development of models to verify the extent of neurological damage, to estimate the progress of neurodegenerative diseases. The two Italian and Swedish universities have joined forces to understand how the brain processes the experience of touch. The results of research conducted on animal models, have cast a new light on the development of tactile sensory signals from the brain and the subsequent formation of the representation of the outside world. This discovery, published today, was achieved with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the Ministry of Education, University and Research, the Swedish Research Council and the European Commission. For Italy, the results will be further applied by the Sant'Anna School thanks to ongoing research projects with INAIL and Regione Toscana, to develop new robotic prostheses, able to give back to amputees a sense of touch, or robot able to make even more precise and rapid tactile detection of tumors during surgical operations. Using a bionic finger able to return with his fingertip the sense of touch in an artificial manner, the Italian-Swedish group was able to generate artificial tactile sensations, transmitted to the nerve endings of the skin, thus imitating the behavior of nerve receptors found on the fingertips. The analysis of the response to these stimuli by somatosensory cortex (cerebral cortex also specialized in the processing of tactile impulses) have revealed how neurons process the signals coming from the periphery of the body to represent in our brain interaction with the outside world, just by touch. (Red)

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Specifically, the study was conducted by the Institute of BioRobotics of SSSA, under the scientific direction of bioengineers Calogero Oddo and Silvestro Micera, and the University of Lund, with the scientific direction of Henrik Jörntell. These scientists are the managers of international and national research projects which supported the study, with funding from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation - Directorate-General for the promotion of the country system (Economics, Culture and Science) - for the Scientific and Technological Cooperation Unit - and the Ministry of Education, University and research, through the bilateral research project SensBrain and national project PRIN / HandBot. Funding also came from the European Commission under the FP7-FET NEBIAS and FP7-NMP NANOBIOTOUCH projects, from Hjärnfonden Swedish fund and the Swedish Research Council.