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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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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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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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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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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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…