BME lab contributed to the 2022 TriCity Brain Week

Last Friday, we ran a successful workshop about the power of concentration at the TriCity Brain Week event held at the University of Gdansk. Ola and Amanda from our BME lab group prepared fantastic presentations for a wide spectrum of audience, ranging from preschoolers all the way up to adults. A brief introduction into the psychology and neurobiology of vigilance, attention and concentration was followed by demonstration of our toy brain-computer interface (BCI). It worked particularly…

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Historical epilepsy surgery in Poland

On Dec 8th, 2022 we participated in a historical neurosurgical procedure of implanting multiple special electrodes to precisely localize the source of seizures in a young 21 year-old patient. The electrodes contained arrays of both standard macro-contacts (each less than 1cm big) to record large brain wave activities and special micro-contacts (each less than 100 micrometers big) to record local brain waves and even detect electrical impulses from individual brain cells (single neurons). These were implanted…

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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…

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Dr. Kucewicz and our research highlighted in a book about Gdansk

The story of our BME lab is one of the highlights of a new book entitled: ‘Gdansk wczoraj i dzis 1990-2020. 30 lat samorzadnosci’ (‘Gdansk yesterday and today 1990-2020. 30 years of the local government’), which was published on the anniversary of the first democratic local government elections. The book summarizes key achievements in the last thirty years of the city. Our story is in the education section (see the photo), relating back to the Fahrenheit scholarships for…

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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…

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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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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…

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Can you supercharge your memory? | New Scientist | Dr. Michal Kucewicz

Dr. Kucewicz comments on the progress of brain stimulation technologies for the popular science magazine ‘New Scientist’ In the article ‘Can you supercharge your memory?’ published on Oct 24th in the ‘Memory special’ issue of the magazine, Jessica Hamzelou summarizes the state-of-the-art in the field of memory enhancement devices aka memory prostheses. Even though these are developed for patients presenting deficits in memory and cognition, possible applications can be extended to the healthy population to enhance…

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Our lab member, Cagdas Topcu, started his Ph.D. studies

Our lab member, Çağdaş Topçu, started his Ph.D. studies in our project “Neurophysiological mapping and stimulation of the human brain for memory enhancement”. The studies will be in the field of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering at the Gdańsk University of Technology and will last from October 2018 until May 2021 (hopefully!). He was ranked with the highest scores in the qualifying interviews in the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics. His project is part of…

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Research partners from Gdansk, Warsaw, Wroclaw and Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA meet in our new BME lab

September 20th, 2018 is a milestone date for the BME lab and our First Team project entitled: ‘Neurophysiological mapping and stimulation of the human brain for memory enhancement’. Strategic scientists from a wide and interdisciplinary range of expertise met at the Multimedia Systems Department, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics of the Gdansk University of Technology to discuss initial findings, specific roles, and future directions in the project. The entire partnership network of scientists who attended…