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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Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from Czech Republic is joining our BME lab as a laureate of the NAWA academic exchange grant to decipher specific memories in the human brain

After a long vacation break and no BME news for August, we are now happy to announce that Dr. Jan Cimbalnik from the International Clinical Research Center (ICRC) in Brno, Czech Republic, will be joining our BME lab in Gdansk as one of the laureates of prestigious ULAM program grants from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Our proposed project was highly ranked on the seventh position out 70 awardees: https://nawa.gov.pl/en/nawa/news/1184-final-results-of-the-call-in-the-ulam-programme Jan will be…

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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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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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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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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…