• Assistant Professor, School of Engineering & Applied Science

Moran

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• B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Milwaukee School of Engineering
• Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Arizona State University

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Imagine that Teenager first to play video game by brain only Oct. 9, 2006 -- Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL Photo Researchers have enabled a 14-year-old to play a two-dimensional video game using signals from his brain instead of his hands. Download Teenage boys and computer games go hand-in-hand. Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis. The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements. More...

Figuring out your next move Researcher shows what we learn and how we learn Oct. 5, 2005 -- Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL Photo Thoroughman (background) and Taylor tracked the moves that people make. Download Practice makes perfect when people learn behaviors, from baseball pitching to chess playing to public speaking. Biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have now identified how people use individual experiences to improve performance.

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Teenager moves video icons by imagination United Press International and 2 others Oct. 11, 2006 -- A U.S. boy has become the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game using only the signals from his brain to make movements. WUSTL researchers led by neurological surgery professor Eric Leuthardt and biomedical engineering professor Daniel Moran say the boy's achievement might lead to creation of biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, enabling the movement of a prosthesis by just thinking about it.

Brain Power: Mind Control of External Devices Associated Press Online, LiveScience.com (New York) and 25 others March 17, 2005 -- New coverage on this topic -- Researchers and volunteers around the world are taking early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environment literally without moving a muscle. Most dramatically, that could help "locked-in" patients - those who've lost all muscle movement because of conditions like Lou Gehrig's disease or brainstem strokes. Article mentions research at WUSTL, where surgeons placed tiny electrodes on the surface of the brains of four people recently, they achieved accuracies of 74 percent to 100 percent with just three to 24 minutes of training.

Patients play by power of thought Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) and 20 others June 16, 2004 -- Using thought alone and with electrodes placed on the surface of the brain, four volunteers were able to control a simple video game, U.S. researchers report. Simply by thinking the word "move," the volunteers played the game. "We are using pure imagination. These people are not moving their limbs," said Eric Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon at the School of Medicine who worked on the study. Writing in the Journal of Neural Engineering, Leuthardt and Daniel Moran, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the School of Medicine, said the patients learned in minutes how to control a computer cursor.

Motor learning and neural plasticity is another research area of interest. All the motor cortical studies to date have used over-trained subjects during their recordings in order to average data over many recording sessions. However, with his recent advances in multi, single-unit recording methods, a naive subject can be recorded over a period of months to investigate what role motor cortex plays in motor learning. How motor cortical activity changes over multiple motor learning sessions is invaluable data for designing motor cortical controlled neuroprostheses.