We found a hotspot in the brain for improving human memory

Last week our lab released a seminal paper, summarizing 4 years of our work to find a target in the human brain for new therapies to restore memory functions. Previous research localized multiple areas in the brain that showed neural activities predicting successful memory performance. None of these, however, provided a discrete location and a specific neural activity that could be therapeutically modulated to restore memory functions. Çağdaş Topçu, a PhD student in our lab, found that brain rhythms of…

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Visit our new BME lab website at Gdansk Tech!

Our lab has opened new websites in English and Polish on the official domain of our Gdansk University of Technology. It can now be reached through the BioTechMed Center website – BME is one of the research groups within this new center of excellence at Gdansk Tech, or through the website of the faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, where we are based. You will find there an elegant and simple summary of all our…

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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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Która półkula rządzi twoim światem?

Kontynuujemy naszą misję promowania i popularyzowania neuronauki. Nie poddajemy się z powodu trwającej epidemii, wręcz przeciwnie – wirtualna rzeczywistość telekonferencji, nauczanie on-line i udostępnianie filmów stwarzają okazję do dotarcia do szerszego grona odbiorców. Zostaliśmy zaproszeni przez Centrum Nauki Experyment w Gdyni do stworzenia filmu edukacyjnego na temat związany z naszymi badaniami. Przygotowany film ukazuje różnice pomiędzy prawą i lewą półkulą naszego mózgu… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXz3g7DtMog W trakcie filmu dr Kucewicz prowadzi widza przez trzy łatwe testy,…

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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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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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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…