Precision Neuroscience posts a 70-patient map of the human nervous system

By Inside BCI · October 9, 2026

Neuralink trains its software on long-term recordings from the people living with its implant. Precision Neuroscience builds its data from short recordings in many people who are already undergoing surgery. On 8 October it announced a preprint describing what it calls an atlas of the human nervous system, built from the first 70 of those patients, and said the total it has implanted has passed 100.

What the atlas contains

Precision’s Layer 7 Cortical Interface is a thin, flexible film carrying up to 1,024 electrodes per array that rests on the surface of the brain. The FDA cleared it on 30 March 2025 for recording, monitoring and stimulating electrical activity on the surface of the brain, for temporary use of less than 30 days, and Precision announced the clearance on 17 April. Surgeons place it in patients undergoing operations for other reasons, such as tumour removal or epilepsy monitoring.

The preprint, posted on bioRxiv on 1 October under the title “Toward A Whole-Brain Interface Enabled by High-Resolution Surface Electrophysiology”, draws on more than 100,000 electrode placements in those first 70 patients. The recordings cover the areas that control movement and bodily sensation, language and speech regions, and hearing, along with the brainstem and spinal cord, areas the authors describe as historically difficult to record at this resolution.

The maps resolve individual fingers on the brain’s surface, with the change from one finger’s area to the next occurring over about 0.8 to 2.0 millimetres. Precision says the same recordings supported real-time decoding of upper-limb movement, classification of spoken words from few training examples, and recognition of eight facial expressions from the part of the brain that moves the face, which it presents as groundwork for nonverbal communication. It puts the data at 87,342 electrodes, more than 180 hours of synchronised brain and behaviour recordings, and twelve academic medical centres, with recordings taken both during surgery and afterwards.

The data argument

Rapoport, Precision’s co-founder and chief science officer, says the BRAIN Initiative once set a moonshot target of recording one million neurons at once, framing a whole-brain interface as a hardware milestone. “We believe it is, more fundamentally, a data milestone,” he said. In Precision’s view, a reference built across enough patients, tasks and brain regions can achieve something close to whole-brain coverage.

Precision compares the project to sequencing the human genome, a large and consistently formatted dataset that became the basis for new kinds of computation. Mermel, the chief data and AI officer, says the data were recorded uniformly enough across patients and regions to be combined, that the data suggest brain-computer interfaces are becoming a platform-level tool, and that Precision will have more to say about the meeting point with artificial intelligence very soon.

The approach sits at the other end of the spectrum from Neuralink. Neuralink said on 1 October that participants in its trial have streamed more than 50,000 hours of recordings from their long-term implants. Precision’s atlas holds more than 180 hours of synchronised recordings, spread across many people and many parts of the nervous system. Both companies now present the volume of their brain data as a source of value in its own right.

How the count has grown

Precision put its patient count at more than 50 in October 2025 and at almost 100 in July 2026. When it closed a $250 million Series D on 24 September, Precision counted more than 100 patient procedures across 18 medical institutions. It has not said whether any patient had more than one procedure. Precision is still working towards a permanent implant aimed at restoring movement and communication to people with paralysis from spinal cord injury, stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Its chief clinical officer, Jayme Strauss, said in July that the first patient would probably receive the permanent implant at the beginning of 2028.

The preprint lists 61 authors. Sixteen work for Precision, including its chief executive, Michael Mager; the others come from academic medical centres including Mount Sinai, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and Massachusetts General Hospital. It has not been peer reviewed.

Not disclosed

The preprint itself carries no reuse licence, with all rights reserved. Precision has not said how long each patient’s device stayed in, how many of the more than 100 patients were recorded only during surgery, or what its coming announcement on artificial intelligence will contain.

What to watch

Whether Precision’s promised announcement involves a brain foundation model, a partner from the artificial intelligence industry, or access to the atlas for others.

Whether the atlas is opened to outside researchers or licensed commercially.

Whether the preprint passes peer review in its current form.

Whether Precision keeps to the beginning of 2028 for its first permanent implant.

Sources

Primary:

Coverage:

MobiHealthNews: Q&A, first able-bodied individuals receive brain-computer implant, 21 July 2026

Cross-reference to prior InsideBCI coverage:

news Precision-Neuroscience Layer-7 Benjamin-Rapoport Craig-Mermel Michael-Mager whole-brain-interface neural-data brain-atlas bioRxiv spinal-cord brainstem FDA-510k Neuralink foundation-model