It sounds like a miracle, but it’s just AI.
A Long Island man who was paralyzed in a diving accident has seen his mobility and feeling in his body restored, thanks to a groundbreaking machine learning-based operation that “connected a computer to his brain” via microelectrode implants.
According to experts at Manhasset’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Keith Thomas, a 45-year-old Massapequa resident, is being hailed as a “pioneer” case for AI-infused surgeries to treat or cure incurable diseases like blindness, deafness, ALS, seizures, cerebral palsy, and Parkinson’s.
Thomas, a wealthy money manager who has lived in Manhattan for two decades, had fractured his neck and sections of his spine three years ago when jumping into a friend’s pool in Montauk. He blacked out under the water and awakened to discover that he had lost control of his body. The man, who had to return to his South Shore birthplace, had been warned that he would never be able to move below the neck again.
Shocked but willing to fight, his loved ones organized a GoFundMe campaign, which gathered more than $360,000 to meet his needs following the disaster.
According to Dr. Ashesh Mehta, head of the Institute’s Laboratory of Human Brain Mapping, Thomas’ love of life and the people in it is what made him a perfect candidate for the first-of-its-kind operation. A high-pressure 15-hour surgery was necessary, during which Thomas had to be awake to speak with Mehta and the other surgeons.
“The surgery had to go perfectly. There was no room for error,” Mehta told the New York Post. “There’s only one way to get it right and a million ways to screw it up.” At the end of the delicate procedure, however, Thomas was able to touch his sister’s hand for the first time since his injury, thanks to the surgery’s extraordinary success and one week of rehabilitation.
“This is the first time a paralyzed person is regaining movement and sensation by having their brain, body and spinal cord electronically linked together,” Chad Bouton, a professor at Feinstein’s Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine, told the New York Post.
Thomas’s “literal, first-of-its-kind” double bypass brain implant has now become a model for medical research that can only be defined as revolutionary. According to his medical team, due to this individual’s neurological “rewiring,” Thomas may be able to walk again, blind people may be able to see, and the deaf may be able to hear.
As Bouton put it, “the sky’s the limit.”
