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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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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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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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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Foundation for Polish Science extended funding for our First Team research project

We are closing the 2020 calendar year with great news about obtaining additional funding to support the main research project in our Brain and Mind Electrophysiology lab entitled: ‘Neurophysiological mapping and stimulation of the human brain for memory enhancement’. The decision was based on reviewing the progress and plans for continuing research in this project. One of the main discoveries made so far is a new area in the left frontal lobe of our cortex,…

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Invited presentation on the national “Zdrowie Polakow” congress

Dr. Kucewicz from our laboratory was invited to prepare a video talk about our work for the largest health conference in Poland. In the talk he described the latest methods that were developed in our group to analyze electrophysiological signals from the human brain. One of them employs an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach to automatically select electrodes that record from brain regions that engage in memory functions without a need for expert review and manual selection. This approach also…

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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…