Hubei Province's medical insurance bureau today released China's first price list for brain-computer interface (BCI) medical services, marking the formal inclusion of this cutting-edge technology into the medical service system and bringing new hope to patients with neurological disorders. The announced prices cover three key services: ¥6552 per invasive BCI implantation, ¥3139 per invasive BCI removal, and ¥966 per non-invasive BCI adaptation.
The Hubei Provincial Medical Insurance Bureau's notice clarifies that public medical institutions throughout the province can offer these services based on their capabilities, implementing the maximum price limit and allowing price reductions.
According to official introductions, BCI technology establishes a direct pathway between the brain and external devices, identifying brainwave activity generated by brain activity and converting it into computer commands, thus enabling direct interaction between humans and machines or the external environment. This technology is expected to create medical miracles in areas such as paralysis, aphasia, and blindness.
In recent years, the application range of BCI technology has continuously expanded. It not only shows potential in the treatment of neurological deficits such as hemiplegia and aphasia, but is also highly anticipated in the treatment of functional neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and depression.
Previously, Zhejiang University achieved a significant breakthrough in the field of brain-computer interfaces. In April 2024, its research team achieved the first-ever brain-computer interface for Chinese character writing. A 76-year-old patient with high-level paraplegia successfully used an invasive brain-computer interface to write "Zhejiang University Brain-Computer Interface" with their thoughts. The team overcame the unique encoding mechanism of Chinese character writing, developing a new technology for decoding Chinese character writing trajectories. Through a dynamic decoding model, they captured and analyzed the patient's imagined writing trajectory in real-time, controlling the robotic arm to complete the writing. The offline classification accuracy for 100 commonly used Chinese characters reached 91.3%, and with language model assistance, this increased to 96.2%.
Hubei Province's release of the BCI medical service price list will undoubtedly accelerate the clinical application of this technology, bringing good news to more patients.
