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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

‘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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

Our latest results presented on the world’s largest neuroscience conference

Our BME lab demonstrated exciting new findings from the Ph.D. projects of Victoria Marks (Mayo Graduate School) and Cagdas Topcu (Gdansk University of Technology) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, USA, which was attended by almost 30 000 brain scientists from all across the globe. Tory and Cagdas had a chance to discuss and share their analysis results presented as posters with other peers and experts from the field and beyond. Theo…

Continue reading...

Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from Czech Republic is joining our BME lab as a laureate of the NAWA academic exchange grant to decipher specific memories in the human brain

After a long vacation break and no BME news for August, we are now happy to announce that Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from the International Clinical Research Center (ICRC) in Brno, Czech Republic, will be joining our BME lab in Gdansk as one of the laureates of prestigious ULAM program grants from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Our proposed project was highly ranked on the seventh position out 70 awardees: https://nawa.gov.pl/en/nawa/news/1184-final-results-of-the-call-in-the-ulam-programme Jan will be…

Continue reading...

New BME lab video is going to show how the brain memorizes words!

Theodore Thayib joined our BME lab as a summer undergrad student to help us with a challenging task to visualize brain activity collected from over 150 patients remembering lists of words. Theo’s skills and talents in computer sciences, which he studies as major at the Iowa State University, enabled us to follow the brain waves that underlie thinking and memorizing words across multiple dimensions of the 3D brain anatomy, time of word presentation, and six different…

Continue reading...

Our article is in the top 100 neuroscience Scientific Reports papers in 2018

It is our great pleasure to announce that our recent discovery published in the article entitled: ‘Pupil size reflects successful encoding and recall of memory in humans’ received over two thousand article views in 2018, placing it as one of the top 100 read neuroscience papers for the Nature group journal Scientific Reports. The journal published more than 1600 neuroscience papers in the same year. In the article, we showed by taking careful measurements of the pupil size in the eyes…

Continue reading...

First patient data collected at Mayo Clinic!

The first quarter of 2019 is marked with a major milestone for our BME lab. We collected behavioral and electrophysiological recordings from 128 channels of multiple electrodes implanted in three patients when they were performing computer tasks with tracking their eye movements. To our knowledge this is the first such recording with EEG signals collected directly from the patient brain during performance of verbal memory and other tasks combined with high-accuracy estimation of the pupil…