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…

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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…

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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…

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Our methods presented on the 17th European Congress of Clinical Neurophysiology in Warsaw

Cagdas Topcu – the early stage researcher in our BME lab – shared his ideas on the largest gathering of clinical neurophysiologists in Europe, which took place this June in the capital of Poland. His presentation entitled: ‚Data-driven selection of active iEEG channels during verbal memory task performance’ described new approaches to fully automatic and patient-specific selection of electrodes with meaningful electrophysiological activities recorded in patients trying to remember list of words. The goal of…

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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…

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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…

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Mayo Clinic Annual Research Day Symposium 2019

This month Cagdas Topcu, PhD student in our BME lab, presented his first results on the ‚Mayo Clinic Annual Research Day’ symposium in Rochester, Minnesota, USA. His poster entitled: ‚Data-driven selection of active iEEG channels during verbal memory task performance’ showed a fully automatic and individualized methodological approach to selecting ‚active’ electrodes, which record brain wave activity from regions engaged during memory tasks. Finding a robust electrode selection method is critical for efficient and reproducible…

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How is memory organized in the brain? New research article from our BME lab

Where is memory encoded in the brain? Is there one or multiple brain regions involved? How is it organized in anatomical space and time of memory encoding? In our latest article published this month in the open-access journal eNeuro of the Society for Neuroscience we addressed these questions using brain recordings from epilepsy patients performing a simple task to remember lists of words. We found an organized network of multiple brain regions showing differences in…

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Members of the BME lab published their new paper about assessing consciousness with eye-tracking

Members of the BME lab, Michal Lech and Michal Kucewicz, have just published a paper in Frontiers in Neurology with Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski from the Multimedia Systems Department of Gdansk University of Technology’ entitled: ‘Human Computer Interface (HCI) for tracking eye movements improves assessment and diagnosis of patients with acquired brain injuries’. In the paper, we show that our HCI interface called ‘Cyber Eye’, which was developed by Prof. Czyżewski’s team, can detect minimally conscious…

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Research at Mayo Clinic started!

Our postdoc, Michal Lech, and Ph.D. student, Cagdas Topcu, officially started their research training with our strategic partner Mayo Clinic on December 3rd after arriving to Minnesota in a heavy blizzard (Winters start early in this part of the world!). This research is based in the Mayo Systems Electrophysiology Lab led by Prof. Gregory Worrell (www.msel.mayo.edu) and will involve epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted in the brain to treat refractory seizures. For the next one…