Precision Neuroscience Unveils a New Map of the Human Nervous System

A uniquely large dataset spanning cortex, brainstem, and spinal cord in 70 patients—released as the Precision system passes its 100th patient implant

NEW YORK, Oct. 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Precision Neuroscience Corporation today announced a new manuscript describing a growing atlas of the human central nervous system, built from high-resolution surface electrophysiology recordings in 70 patients across twelve academic medical centers. The atlas is designed to grow with every patient enrolled in Precision’s ongoing clinical studies, and already comprises more than 100,000 electrode deployments spanning primary motor and somatosensory cortex, language and speech regions, auditory cortex, and—for the first time in a high-density surface electrophysiology dataset—brainstem and spinal cord structures that have historically been inaccessible at this resolution. The manuscript is available today on bioRxiv.

Since the data described in this manuscript were collected, the total number of patients implanted with the Precision system has continued to grow, and has now surpassed 100.

Precision is developing an implantable brain-computer interface to restore function to people living with serious neurological conditions, including forms of paralysis caused by spinal cord injury and stroke, as well as neurodegenerative disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The atlas announced today is a direct product of that effort. Every recording in it was collected through the same clinical program, using the same underlying technology, that Precision is advancing toward a permanent implant capable of restoring movement, speech, and communication.

The atlas also represents a foundational step toward what Precision calls a “whole-brain interface”: not a single device placed in a single patient, but a systematically growing, multi-subject, multi-region data resource that, in aggregate, achieves something functionally equivalent to whole-brain coverage.

“The BRAIN Initiative once set a moonshot target: a system capable of recording from one million neurons simultaneously,” said Benjamin Rapoport, MD, PhD, co-founder and chief science officer of Precision Neuroscience. “That framing imagined the whole-brain interface as a hardware milestone. We believe it is, more fundamentally, a data milestone. No single patient, and no single device, needs to carry the entire weight of that ambition. What matters is whether, across subjects, tasks, brain regions, and time, you can build a reference that is functionally complete. That is what the atlas is designed to become.”

About the Atlas

The atlas is built from data acquired using the Layer 7 Cortical Interface, Precision’s conformable thin-film microelectrode array, which records from up to 1,024 channels at 400-micron pitch—a spatial sampling density more than 600-fold greater than contemporary clinical standards. Across the 70-patient cohort described in the manuscript, recordings span intraoperative and extraoperative settings and include more than 180 hours of synchronized neural and behavioral data, drawn from 87,342 individual microelectrodes recording across more than 100,000 unique anatomic locations. The atlas demonstrates reproducible somatotopic organization, canonical spectral signatures, and task-modulated population dynamics across individuals and across regions of the central nervous system that have never before been characterized at this resolution in a multi-subject dataset.

Across the cohort, the recordings resolve submillimeter somatotopy in the Rolandic cortex—individual finger representations at the scale of the electrode pitch, with sensory polarity reversals localized to transitions as small as 0.8 mm—alongside real-time motor decoding from upper extremity motor cortex; high-accuracy classification of spoken words from ventrolateral frontal cortex using only a small number of training examples; and the classification of eight distinct facial expressions from face motor cortex, establishing a basis for nonverbal communication interfaces. The same recordings extend, for the first time at this resolution, beyond the cortex entirely: high-resolution tonotopy in auditory-associated temporal cortex, and—in a first for high-density surface electrophysiology—stimulus-locked responses from the trigeminal root, dorsal columns, and thoracic spinal cord.

Beyond the Atlas: An Emerging Intuition

“When we began this program, we had an intuition that this kind of data-high-resolution, multi-region, collected across many patients, tasks, and regions —would turn out to be valuable in ways that went beyond any single clinical application,” said Craig Mermel, MD, PhD, chief data and AI officer at Precision. “That intuition is starting to prove out. It could only be tested with a dataset at this scale and this breadth. And it required something the field hasn't had before: neural data recorded and formatted uniformly enough, across enough patients and regions, that it can actually be stitched together.”

Precision draws a comparison to the sequencing of the human genome: a large, systematically collected, and consistently formatted dataset that became more than a scientific record—it became the substrate for an entirely new category of computation and insight. Precision’s atlas is built on the same premise: that digitizing the electrical language of the nervous system, and making it computable at scale, is a prerequisite for the next generation of both neuroscience and neurotechnology.

“We are beginning to see population-wide insights emerge from this data that simply weren't accessible before—not from any single patient's recording, but from the aggregate,” Mermel added. “That's new for this field. Brain-computer interface technology has largely been framed, understandably, around a narrow and important set of applications for people with paralysis and communication disorders. What we’re seeing in this data suggests that something larger and deeper is emerging—that brain-computer interfaces are becoming a platform-level tool, and that the data itself has implications reaching beyond its original purpose, toward adjacent fields. The artificial intelligence community has always watched the space closely in anticipation of this moment of convergence. Precision will have more to say on that very soon.”

About Precision Neuroscience

Precision Neuroscience is developing breakthrough treatments and technology for millions of people worldwide. The company is building the only brain–computer interface designed to be minimally invasive, safely removable, and high-bandwidth. To learn more about how Precision is connecting human and artificial intelligence, visit www.precisionneuro.io.

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