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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‚Naukowe Love’, i.e. sharing our passion for neuroscience across all generations

This month Dr. Kucewicz engaged in several public events dedicated to promoting neuroscience and awareness of the societal problems that our research addresses. ‚Centrum Naukowe Eksperyment’ in Gdynia invited us to present and run a workshop on their special Valentine’s Day event ‚Naukowe Love’ about the heart and the brain (btw, St. Valentine is the patron for epilepsy). Our workshop was attended by most of the participants (over 700 in total!) with almost continuous 4…

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Can post-comatose minimally conscious patients read? A new study by the member of our BME lab assesses with eye-tracking technology.

Dr. Michal Lech, postdoc in our BME lab, in his recent Scientific Reports publication with Dr. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, Dr. Piotr Odya, and Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski from the Department of Multimedia Systems of the Gdansk University of Technology, found that the post-comatose patients with minimal consciousness tend to preserve reading comprehension skills but neglect syntax and spelling. Their results showed that most patients preserved the ability to read one- and two-syllable words and comprehended sentences but…

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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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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…