Have your say
BRAIN@INESC TEC: Our first result
By João Paulo Cunha*
When I arrived at FEUP [Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto] about a year and a half ago I created a new R&D group called BRAIN (Biomedical Research And INnovation), which has now joined INESC TEC.
At BRAIN we have two main R&D vectors: NeuroEngineering and Quantified self. NeuroEngineering is an area of Biomedical Engineering that focuses on developing systems to help diagnose and treat neurological illnesses, namely in neurosurgery, neurophysiology, neurology and neuropsychology. Quantified self combines R&D that focuses on wearable monitoring devices capable of recognising patterns, identifying biomarkers of an illness (for instance, cardiovascular changes), an acute event (for instance, an epileptic seizure) or simply a change in a person’s well-being (for example, this month’s extra weight is related to the fact that I did not go to the gym as frequently and my energy output was lower).
It was with great satisfaction that we received the news that our first R&D result had seen the light of day. I’m talking about the first scientific paper bearing the group’s affiliation, published in Epilepsy and Behavior. Entitled “Upper limb automatisms differ quantitatively in temporal and frontal lobe epilepsies” [1], this paper focuses on the NeuroEngineering vector, and comes from a long line of R&D in motion quantification in neurological illnesses, which is now being pursued at INESC TEC.
Together with our colleagues at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Munich and IEETA/University of Aveiro, Portugal, we have demonstrated, based on an analysis of 58 epileptic seizures, that a certain type of movement induced by the seizures contain some patterns that make it possible to automatically detect if the origin of the seizure is in one of four possible regions in the brain (the frontal or temporal lobes). This result has practical implications on the neurological clinical practice because it will provide doctors with information that will help them make more informed decisions on the patients’ treatment. This is evidence that movement quantification in neurological illnesses has clinical implications, and this is the reason we’ve been embracing this mission for over ten years.
Furthermore, this result confirms that after a relatively short period of time we were able to get the proper conditions to continue a highly relevant R&D path and to obtain results from this new challenge that is BRAIN. That would not be possible if the Board of INESC TEC, the DEEC [Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering] and FEUP had not believed in us and for that reason I want to publicly thank them. My initial conviction was that in the universe of the University of Porto I would find the proper conditions to develop these R&D vectors. And now we have the first confirmation that we are on the right track and I have great hope that our future challenges will drive BRAIN to be a force for R&D and innovation in the area that I decided to devote my life to: biomedical engineering.
*Manager of the group Biomedical Research And INnovation (BRAIN)
[1] Cunha JPS, Rémi J, Vollmar C, Fernandes JM, Gonzalez-Vitores JA, Noachtar S. Upper limb automatisms differ quantitatively in temporal and frontal lobe epilepsies. Epilepsy & Behavior. 2013;27:404-408.
