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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How is memory organized in the brain? New research article from our BME lab

Where is memory encoded in the brain? Is there one or multiple brain regions involved? How is it organized in anatomical space and time of memory encoding? In our latest article published this month in the open-access journal eNeuro of the Society for Neuroscience we addressed these questions using brain recordings from epilepsy patients performing a simple task to remember lists of words. We found an organized network of multiple brain regions showing differences in…

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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…