Wywieramy kliniczny i badawczy wpływ na polską neuronaukę

Nie spodziewaliśmy się, że nasz projekt „First Team”, finansowany przez Fundację na rzecz Nauki Polskiej, wywrze taki wpływ na badanie i leczenie zaburzeń mózgu w Polsce. W tym miesiącu zaakceptowano nasz wniosek o zakup dodatkowej wysokospecjalistycznej aparatury badawczej do rejestrowania pracy i stymulowania mózgu, po uprzednim uzyskaniu zgody pod względem etycznym na wykorzystywanie jej do celów badawczych i klinicznych w Polsce. Początkowo planowano stosowanie jej w terapii pacjentów cierpiących na chorobę Parkinsona lub na zaburzenia…

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‚Naukowe Love’, i.e. sharing our passion for neuroscience across all generations

This month Dr. Kucewicz engaged in several public events dedicated to promoting neuroscience and awareness of the societal problems that our research addresses. ‚Centrum Naukowe Eksperyment’ in Gdynia invited us to present and run a workshop on their special Valentine’s Day event ‚Naukowe Love’ about the heart and the brain (btw, St. Valentine is the patron for epilepsy). Our workshop was attended by most of the participants (over 700 in total!) with almost continuous 4…

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Can post-comatose minimally conscious patients read? A new study by the member of our BME lab assesses with eye-tracking technology.

Dr. Michal Lech, postdoc in our BME lab, in his recent Scientific Reports publication with Dr. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, Dr. Piotr Odya, and Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski from the Department of Multimedia Systems of the Gdansk University of Technology, found that the post-comatose patients with minimal consciousness tend to preserve reading comprehension skills but neglect syntax and spelling. Their results showed that most patients preserved the ability to read one- and two-syllable words and comprehended sentences but…

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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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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…