Meet our new BME lab scientists!

We are delighted to introduce our new neuroscientists, who are joining the BME lab in Gdansk for doctoral studies and postdoc positions in the Opus LAP and Weave-UNISONO international collaborative projects between the Gdansk Tech, Medical University in Wroclaw, St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno and Mayo Clinic in the USA. These exciting projects start in two weeks and aim to identify and modulate the brain wave activities of specific memories in human patients…

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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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R&D Impact award for our research

This month we are celebrating an interesting recognition of the last four years of our work at the BME lab. Dr. Michal Kucewicz, the founder of the lab, received an R&D impact award as one of the 34 laureates in Poland, who have the greatest impact on the economics and the society through their research and development. The award brilliantly summarizes the relatively short but fruitful history of the lab since its foundation in Poland.…

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Theta waves reveal how brain connections and memory develops in growing children

In the new issue of a prestigious journal Current Biology, Dr. Michal Kucewicz and our collaborator Dr. Jan Kaminski offer a commentary on the latest finding about the role of theta waves in the development of brain connections and our abilities to remember life events. The study was done in children and adolescents implanted with intracranial electrodes like the ones that we use for our research for treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy. The theta waves, which are approximately 3 to…

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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BME lab publishes unique human brain recordings

This month our BME lab published unique recordings of brain wave activities from electrodes implanted in epilepsy patients. The electrodes were recording signals from multiple contacts located in various regions of the brain as the patients were performing computer tasks for memory and cognitive functions. At the same time, an infra-red light camera was registering the size and position of the pupils in both eyes to determine gaze focus and the level of attention (synchronized with the…

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Visit our new BME lab website at Gdansk Tech!

Our lab has opened new websites in English and Polish on the official domain of our Gdansk University of Technology. It can now be reached through the BioTechMed Center website – BME is one of the research groups within this new center of excellence at Gdansk Tech, or through the website of the faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, where we are based. You will find there an elegant and simple summary of all our…

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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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BME lab research promotes clinical neuroscience in television

In the last two months we were able to reach more people than we did from the beginning of the lab’s existence. This major break-through in communicating and explaining our research to the general public was made possible thanks to a video material and a studio interview in a mainstream television show and thanks to a new documentary movie about our studies with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for treating movement disorders. The first appearance was intended to…

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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),…