[stochastician]

I used to build BMI systems in graduate school, from the lowest level (mixed-signal analog design for 70 uV extracelleular signals) to DSP (128 DSPs doing real time analysis) to the network (built my own ethernet MAC, foolishly!) to all the vis and RT-linux-based analysis. I left the area and switched into ML in grad school, but if I had to do it all over again there's one thing I think is missing:

Optics. Optics optics optics.

A tremendous amount of neural interfacing, especially in non-human primates and other organisms, is done via optics. ~All the advances in neural data acquisition over the past decade have been optical. Microscopy is the future for a tremendous amount of neuroscience and more and more people are considering it seriously for human-scale BMI.

I know optics isn't always thought of in an EE context, but it should be! Many people doing amazing computational imaging and optics work are in EE departments. Computational imaging is the new hotness and can let you combine your existing CS skills with signal processing and optics to do things like build a lensless camera! https://waller-lab.github.io/DiffuserCam/

If I were you I would ditch the RF part of your plan and study optics. Yeah, it's all EM, but the order-of-magnitude differences in the frequencies involved makes the underlying engineering quite different.

[WillSlim95]

OP I highly recommend you listen to this guy here, among all the replies here they have the most experience with what you are aiming for.

[dboreham]

> Optics. Optics optics optics.

Maxwell would have agreed.

[bucket2015]

OP here - Thanks! I'll put back the optics courses I deleted then

[Balgair]

Bit late to the party, but this person is very much correct. I also do BMI work and optics is undoubtedly the future for neuroscience. The optics book you want to get is Hecht:

https://www.amazon.com/Optics-5th-Eugene-Hecht/dp/0133977226

That's a good intro into real optics.

It's much more than the optics chapter you'll get in a physics textbook. It goes over the classical ray optics in good detail, does a great job with traditional matrices and that formulation of optics (the one that the design programs like Zemax use), goes well into the real meat-n-potatoes of wave optics (including birefringence, a huge part of biological optics), gives you a good accounting of how lenses and other optical devices are actually Fourier transformers, and also dives into the more esoteric optical devices (a must for practical neuro-optics).

It's an upper-division/graduate level book, fyi. So I'd back-load it in your study course. Though in terms of neuro-optics it's more of a keyhole book.

If you are particularly interested and really want to know what's actually going on with EM, then you need to go through Jackson:

https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Electrodynamics-Third-David...

This is the book on EM, but is very much physics graduate student level. And honestly, I don't think you's need it for BMI stuff. But if you don't go through it, you'll just be trusting other people when they say your ideas won't work and they can't really explain it to you. Just going through Jackson is a bit of a hazing experience and will earn respect.

[stochastician]

Feel free to email / dm me (HN and twitter handle are the same) if you ever have any questions.