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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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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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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New discovery – brain waves that coordinate formation of human memories

We are delighted to share with you about the recent publication of our research findings, which appeared this month in the journal NeuroImage. It is a result of almost 4 years of our work on mapping the brain waves generated in our brain as memories for words are formed. Tory Marks, a PhD student of biomedical engineering at Mayo Clinic, worked together with other members of our BME lab on a large dataset of over 150…

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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),…

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First intra-operative recordings in Poland

We are delighted to share our next breakthrough with advancing clinical neuroscience research in Poland. This month we have recorded for the first time pupil responses to electrical stimulation in the deep brain structures called the basal ganglia. The recordings were part of a standard therapy for Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders called the Deep Brain Stimulation. In this therapy, electrical stimulation is delivered through special electrodes implanted in the brain of an awake patient…

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The new year of breakthroughs and harvest for the neuroscience in Poland

The beginning of 2021 was marked by a rapid acceleration of our endeavours to pioneer intracranial brain recordings and stimulation in Poland. Together with our project partners at the Wroclaw Medical University we implemented recently purchased, state-of-the-art system called ‚Atlas’ (by Neuralynx Inc.) for clinical and research electrophysiological studies in the human brain. Two entire days in Wroclaw were dedicated to assemble and present the system to a team of experts at the university hospital. The…

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New student projects to help us ‚crack the code’ of verbal memory and predict its recall from eye movements

Karolina Kacprzycka joined our BME team to study how words are represented in the human brain. For this she will be using our latest intracranial recordings from Mayo Clinic patients performing tasks to remember words. We hypothesize that bursts of the fast brain waves (aka ‚high frequency oscillations’) in particular brain regions reflect firing of neuronal assemblies that encode particular words. If true, then these fast waves can be used to identify specific words being processed at…

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Dr. Kucewicz and our research highlighted in a book about Gdansk

The story of our BME lab is one of the highlights of a new book entitled: ‚Gdansk wczoraj i dzis 1990-2020. 30 lat samorzadnosci’ (‚Gdansk yesterday and today 1990-2020. 30 years of the local government’), which was published on the anniversary of the first democratic local government elections. The book summarizes key achievements in the last thirty years of the city. Our story is in the education section (see the photo), relating back to the Fahrenheit scholarships for…

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Which hemisphere dominates your world?

We have not given up on our mission to promote and popularize neuroscience during the pandemic. On the contrary, virtual reality of teleconference meetings, online teaching and sharing videos opened an opportunity to reach a wider audience. Our lab was invited by the Experyment science center in Gdynia to create an educational video about a topic related to our research. The video we created explores the differences between the left and the right hemisphere of our brain… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXz3g7DtMog…