News
2023
December: Time to say goodbye. Our SNSF-funded project ended in November. We celebrated this with a retreat in Interlaken inviting former and current group members to present their mapping and tractography work. A big thank you to Alba, Roberto, Simon, Quentin, Bryan, Simona, Jan, India, Adriana, Khoa and collaborators at Inselspital and elsewhere. Next up will be Alba's PhD defense in early 2024. See you on the other side.
September: A few updates. Simona's and Alba's retrospective connectivity analysis of four patients with treatment-resistant depression and deep brain stimulation was accepted and is available online in European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. India, Adriana, Jan and Khoa presented posters at Clinical Neuroscience Bern. You can find the posters here.
June: Alba is finishing her stay at Mount Sinai and will be back in Bern from mid-July. Six months have gone by fast! Her work on assisted DBS programming based on the hyperdirect pathway and corticospinal tract has been published. Congratulations! The paper is openly available with Human Brain Mapping .
Khoa enjoyed the history and community at the first meeting of the DBS Society in Grenoble.
Jan has also returned to the group for a four month stay to continue his work on assisted DBS programming with deep learning. More information soon.
March: Alba has started her research project on DBS for obsessive-compulsive disorder at Mount Sinai with Prof. Ki Sueng Choi, while Adriana is learning the ropes of diffusion imaging and tractography. Khoa has submitted a proposal for the SNSF Starting Grant and met with colleagues at the Brain Stimulation conference in Lisbon.
2022
December: We had an intense end of year and enjoyed 2022. Jan and Bryan defended their master theses on deep learning for stimulation maps and tractography for STN DBS. Adriana joined our team as an intern and Alba is heading to Mount Sinai in the US for a six month stay. Looking forward to 2023.
September: We had a great time at WSSFN in Incheon, Korea, earlier this month. Thanks to all attendees for the discussions and a special thank you to Prof. Chul-Bum Cho from the Catholic University of Korea, St. Vincent's Hospital for his hospitality. In other news, we have updated our Gitlab site. You can now find analysis scripts from past publications there.
July: We have a few new proposals for master theses. Have a look at our page.
June: Simona, Alba and Khoa presented posters at OptoDBS in Geneva. It was a fascinating meeting covering new methods for basic and clinical research.
May: Quentin and Simona successfully defended their master thesis projects. We are happy for them and thank them for their hard work.
Jan Waligorski started a master project with us in March and is exploring deep learning for stimulation maps. Bryan Perdrizat started this month and will analyze hyperdirect pathway activation.
Simon will present his sweet spot work at the meeting of the International Neuromodulation Society in Barcelona.
March: We have three articles in press and we are grateful for these collaborations. The first article reports mapping for essential tremor from a multicentric European cohort. A second article demonstrates the use of a sweet spot to assist DBS programming in a commercial software. We had presented the sweet spot in 2019 and it is specific to rigidity reduction in the subthalamic nucleus. The third article is also on assisting DBS programming but with both electrophysiology and sweet spot. Moreover, last week Simona submitted her master thesis with the title Exploring Connectivity Profiles of Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment-Resistant Depression. It was great having her in our lab and we wish her all the best for the future!
2021
November 30: Simon bids farewell. He finished his IAESTE internship with us and developed a sweet-spot-based algorithm to generate suggestions for contacts and current amplitudes. It will be installable for Lead-DBS. Manuscript to come.
November 10: Alba and Khoa will present their posters at the Society for Neuroscience 2021 virtual meeting. Join us in session P269 Parkinson's disease therapeutic strategies from 8:45pm to 9:45pm Central European Time (1:45pm to 2:45pm Central Standard Time). Our videos can be watched here (hyperdirect pathway) and here (stimulation maps).
November 1--5: Roberto Garza is presenting at this year's IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference. If you are registered, watch his presentation on patient-specific anisotropic VTA estimation here.
October 1: We welcome Quentin Savary from the University of Bern to the team! He will be doing his master thesis on refining stimulation maps of the subthalamic nucleus for Parkinson's disease.
September 17: Alba finished two weeks of summer school at ETH Zurich. EXCITE was exciting and she learnt more about biomedical imaging.
September 11: Khoa returned from the congress of the European Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. He was grateful to present at the in-person congress in Marseille.
August 30: We welcome Simona Leserri from the EPF Lausanne to the team! She will be investigating DBS for depression with structural and functional connectivity.
July 1: We welcome Simon Nordenström from Gothenburg to the team! He will be doing an five month IAESTE internship to work on computer-assisted programming.