Monthly Archives: February 2011

I’m writing this little contribution on Saturday night. Most people must be either watching the World Championships Ice Skating or enjoying themselves in the nightlife. Maybe you are lucky and you are in the Oosterpoort (Groningen) tonight listening to a concert by ‘Gare du Nord‘. Or you prefer to immerse yourself in the sounds of fabulous guitar solos and keep dancing like there’s no tomorrow. 

But there will be a tomorrow. And the more successful last night was, the harder the Sunday morning is. With a liver getting in overdrive and a brain complaining about a lack of water, you wonder why you cannot sleep any further. Soon you realize it must be that annoying beep in your head. Maybe standing next to the big loudspeakers was not a good idea after all. Well, let’s first take a shower, the beep will be gone during the course of this lazy Sunday.

Or not… Imagine this beep will stay with you. Always. More than a million people in Holland suffer from a disease called Tinittus. In about 10% of the cases the beep (or noise) is so loud that it limits them in their daily life. No effective treatment exists until today. But we are working on it. Brain stimulation can be an effective treatment method. And in our group we are developing the ‘uStim’-stimulator: it can stimulate the brain in a unique manner so that we can stop the beep. We use technology to manipulate faulty activity in the brain.

Sounds interesting? Keep reading this blog for updates about this little device. Oh, and keep enjoying yourselves on (Saturday) nights. But just as with all things in life: keep it safe. Unless you are watching the World Championships Ice Skating. I cannot think of any way how you can harm yourself while doing that…

Marijn van Dongen 

"Electrical stimulation of certain hypothalamic regions in cats and rodents can elicit attack behaviour," is what we can read in Nature today. But also "Neurons activated during attack are inhibited during mating, suggesting a potential neural substrate for competition between these opponent social behaviours." If the same holds for human beings, which is highly probable, then we are not far away from the situation in which we can replace Cialis by a healthy dosis of instant neurostimulation or switch the neurostimulator to Arousal Mode No. 2 to beat the guy that left the bar with another one’s girlfriend. As long as they do not take my Erdinger, I’m fine.

© Thinkstock

Jokes aside, it is known that both regions in the brain are closely located to one another, together with the part that controls voluntary urination. So my advice: don’t try this at home.

It looks like the best way to detect the onset of an epileptic insult is by doing a wavelet transform on the acquired ECoG. However, which morphological features to look at is far from trivial. For the first generation of closed-loop neurostimulators it is therefore probably best to acquire the complete ECoG signal at full resolution and do the morphological analysis in the digital domain entirely. In a later phase, the (analog) frontend (sense amplifier) can be made more specific, thereby releasing the burden from the analog-to-digital converter and the signal processing in the digital domain.