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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from Czech Republic is joining our BME lab as a laureate of the NAWA academic exchange grant to decipher specific memories in the human brain

After a long vacation break and no BME news for August, we are now happy to announce that Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from the International Clinical Research Center (ICRC) in Brno, Czech Republic, will be joining our BME lab in Gdansk as one of the laureates of prestigious ULAM program grants from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Our proposed project was highly ranked on the seventh position out 70 awardees: https://nawa.gov.pl/en/nawa/news/1184-final-results-of-the-call-in-the-ulam-programme Jan will be…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…

Continue reading...

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…