Invited presentation on the national “Zdrowie Polakow” congress

Dr. Kucewicz from our laboratory was invited to prepare a video talk about our work for the largest health conference in Poland. In the talk he described the latest methods that were developed in our group to analyze electrophysiological signals from the human brain. One of them employs an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach to automatically select electrodes that record from brain regions that engage in memory functions without a need for expert review and manual selection. This approach also…

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How to decipher the code of the human mind? A new Interview with Dr. Kucewicz

Gdansk University of Technology (PG), where our BME lab is based, has received a prestigious recognition from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the second best research university in the country (the top technical university). This recognition comes with new developments and investments not only in the research itself but also in public awareness and international promotion. A new interview with Dr. Kucewicz from our lab was published this month on the university website, pioneering…

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New student projects to help us ‘crack the code’ of verbal memory and predict its recall from eye movements

Karolina Kacprzycka joined our BME team to study how words are represented in the human brain. For this she will be using our latest intracranial recordings from Mayo Clinic patients performing tasks to remember words. We hypothesize that bursts of the fast brain waves (aka ‘high frequency oscillations’) in particular brain regions reflect firing of neuronal assemblies that encode particular words. If true, then these fast waves can be used to identify specific words being processed at…

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BME lab highlighted in the radio series about Gdansk University of Technology

Dr. Kucewicz was selected for one of the five interviews in a weekly series about the Gdansk University of Technology presented by Radio Gdansk. The series is dedicated to highlight some interesting research projects conducted at the university, which has recently received a national ministerial award for the best technical research university and the second best overall in the country. This was the third presentation that followed an interview with the chancellor, Prof. Wilde, and with a…

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Dr. Kucewicz and our research highlighted in a book about Gdansk

The story of our BME lab is one of the highlights of a new book entitled: ‘Gdansk wczoraj i dzis 1990-2020. 30 lat samorzadnosci’ (‘Gdansk yesterday and today 1990-2020. 30 years of the local government’), which was published on the anniversary of the first democratic local government elections. The book summarizes key achievements in the last thirty years of the city. Our story is in the education section (see the photo), relating back to the Fahrenheit scholarships for…

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Which hemisphere dominates your world?

We have not given up on our mission to promote and popularize neuroscience during the pandemic. On the contrary, virtual reality of teleconference meetings, online teaching and sharing videos opened an opportunity to reach a wider audience. Our lab was invited by the Experyment science center in Gdynia to create an educational video about a topic related to our research. The video we created explores the differences between the left and the right hemisphere of our brain… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXz3g7DtMog…

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We make clinical and research impact on Polish neuroscience

None of us expected that our First Team project funded by the Foundation for Polish Science is going to make such an impact on studying and treating brain disorders in Poland. This month our application for additional funding of high-tech equipment for brain recording and stimulation was approved, following a preceding ethical approval for using it for research and clinical purposes in Poland. Initially it was planned to be used with patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease and…

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‘Naukowe Love’, i.e. sharing our passion for neuroscience across all generations

This month Dr. Kucewicz engaged in several public events dedicated to promoting neuroscience and awareness of the societal problems that our research addresses. ‘Centrum Naukowe Eksperyment’ in Gdynia invited us to present and run a workshop on their special Valentine’s Day event ‘Naukowe Love’ about the heart and the brain (btw, St. Valentine is the patron for epilepsy). Our workshop was attended by most of the participants (over 700 in total!) with almost continuous 4…

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Can post-comatose minimally conscious patients read? A new study by the member of our BME lab assesses with eye-tracking technology.

Dr. Michal Lech, postdoc in our BME lab, in his recent Scientific Reports publication with Dr. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, Dr. Piotr Odya, and Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski from the Department of Multimedia Systems of the Gdansk University of Technology, found that the post-comatose patients with minimal consciousness tend to preserve reading comprehension skills but neglect syntax and spelling. Their results showed that most patients preserved the ability to read one- and two-syllable words and comprehended sentences but…

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We used Artificial Intelligence methods to identify brain regions engaged in memory encoding

Have you ever looked at EEG signals of the brain wave activity? Would you be able to tell from a multitude of channels the ones that record from a brain region supporting your thinking or remembering abstract ideas? Even neuroscientists with years of experience in looking at and analyzing these signals struggle and can only provide a subjective selection of channels activated in response to a given cognitive process. Moreover, every scientist would select a…