BME lab talks by prof. Milan Brazdil and prof. Greg Worrell

We are delighted to welcome everyone interested in our research to two outstanding talks to be given by world-class neuroscience experts. Milan Brazdil, MD PhD, from St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic, and Prof. Gregory Worrell MD PhD, from Mayo Clinic in Rochester MN, USA, are visiting professors in our BME lab of the BioTechMed Center, funded from the Aurum grant – Supporting International Research Team Building, as part of the Research University program (IDUB) at the Gdansk…

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BME lab research promotes clinical neuroscience in television

In the last two months we were able to reach more people than we did from the beginning of the lab’s existence. This major break-through in communicating and explaining our research to the general public was made possible thanks to a video material and a studio interview in a mainstream television show and thanks to a new documentary movie about our studies with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for treating movement disorders. The first appearance was intended to…

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HOW DIRECT BRAIN STIMULATION AFFECTS LOW (THETA) AND FAST (GAMMA) NEURAL ACTIVITIES? NEW RESEARCH ARTICLE FROM OUR BME LAB

What happens in the brain when it is stimulated with electric current? Can we see a link between the human brain behavior during stimulation and during enhanced memory performance? In our latest article which will be published in the open-access journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering we addressed these questions using brain recordings from epilepsy patients stimulated with electric current during quiet wakefulness. In a fraction of electrode sites in the brain (1.4% on average),…

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Making brain research popular…

This month was marked by multiple media appearances, including local and national radio and television. Our news release for the last month (see February 2021) about the first study of memory processing during a Deep Brain Stimulation surgery in Poland sparked a substantial amount of public interest. A short highlight material was broadcasted in the main issue of Teleexpress, together with a longer report in the regional Panorama. Dr. Kucewicz also gave a more comprehensive interview about this…

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The new year of breakthroughs and harvest for the neuroscience in Poland

The beginning of 2021 was marked by a rapid acceleration of our endeavours to pioneer intracranial brain recordings and stimulation in Poland. Together with our project partners at the Wroclaw Medical University we implemented recently purchased, state-of-the-art system called ‚Atlas’ (by Neuralynx Inc.) for clinical and research electrophysiological studies in the human brain. Two entire days in Wroclaw were dedicated to assemble and present the system to a team of experts at the university hospital. The…

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Foundation for Polish Science extended funding for our First Team research project

We are closing the 2020 calendar year with great news about obtaining additional funding to support the main research project in our Brain and Mind Electrophysiology lab entitled: ‚Neurophysiological mapping and stimulation of the human brain for memory enhancement’. The decision was based on reviewing the progress and plans for continuing research in this project. One of the main discoveries made so far is a new area in the left frontal lobe of our cortex,…

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BME lab receives Aurum grant to develop international patient database of human brain recordings

This month we received exciting news about receiving an intramural grant from the Gdansk University of Technology to build an international database of brain recordings and stimulation from patients performing memory tasks with eye tracking. The grant is called ‚AURUM – Supporting International Research Team Building’ and is part of a larger ‚Uczelnia Badawcza’ award from the Polish Ministry for Science and Higher Education for the top research universities in Poland. In this larger award, we were…

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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…