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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New discovery – brain waves that coordinate formation of human memories

We are delighted to share with you about the recent publication of our research findings, which appeared this month in the journal NeuroImage. It is a result of almost 4 years of our work on mapping the brain waves generated in our brain as memories for words are formed. Tory Marks, a PhD student of biomedical engineering at Mayo Clinic, worked together with other members of our BME lab on a large dataset of over 150…

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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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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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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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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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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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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…