R&D Neuro

INESC TEC is organized (among other structures) into Research centers and laboratories and we would like to highlight the Biomedical Engineering research center (C-BER) (~40 researchers) coordinated by Prof. João Paulo Cunha and Duarte Dias. This center has a Neuro-Engineering laboratory named BRAINLab (Biomedical Research And Innovation Laboratory) with a strong focus on new biomedical engineering methods for neurological diseases, namely Parkinson’s and Epilepsy. BRAINLab was founded in 2014 and lead by Prof. João Paulo Cunha (h index=30), a senior researcher at INESC TEC and an Associate Professor (with Habilitation) of Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Department of ECE of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP).

BRAINLab has been growing each year and at this moment has around 15 active researchers (Faculties, PhD and master students), +10 High quality scientific publications per year and +5 master thesis each year related with Neuro-Engineering, focusing research activity in 5 main research lines: Brain Imaging (&Signal), Man-Machine Symbiosis, Movement Analysis in Neurological Diseases, Neurosurgery Aiding Technology and Macro-2-nano Bio(neuro)sensing.

Along more than 20 years of research in these areas, INESC TEC was able to create a multidisciplinary team of biomedical, electronic and informatics engineers, psychologists, physics and neurologists with renowned experts. The main landmarks until now achieved by this team in the Neuro-Engineering area where: 1- Neurokinect installation at LMU, managing around 6.61TB/day of data, leading to the creation of a unique labelled dataset. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest and only dataset with 3Dvideo-EEG of epileptic seizures. Until now, around 500 labelled seizures were recorded from more than 100 patients.

2- The creation of a start-up (InSignals Neurotech) focused on the wrist rigidity assessment to support neurosurgical procedures of deep brain stimulation. A wearable device with a patented algorithm were created to quantify wrist rigidity rather than subjective assessment that relies on clinicians’ experience and perception. After a 4 year of development with CHUSJ, INESC TEC is now supporting the start-up to extend the number of clinical trials in Europe.

During recent years, strong partnerships have been made with industrial players such as NeuroEventsLabs and Epihunter which is leading to the creation of new research projects for the development of new biomedical diagnosis system with a possible application in these companies’ products. More recently Medtronic also showed interest to joint our research due to our very recent work with their recent Percept PC system for both epilepsy and Parkinson diseases.

Taking into account our long research expertise, mainly in Parkinson Disease we believe that we can bring to the consortium innovative follow-up system based on web&mobile technologies that makethe best use of wearable devices to support in this task. Our current effort on this area is on the research of new movement symptons quantification techniques to improve the its assessment and facilitate clinicians work on the evaluation and follow-up stages. We are also focus on Neurosurgery Aiding Technologies which includes the use of wearable intra-op devices and robotic system in DBS surgeries to optimize the location of the stimulation electrodes. Besides our knowledge we can bring clinical and industrial partners in this area namely national reference clinical centers in DBS and Parkinson disease management (Centro Hospitalar Universitário de São João) our start-up and possibly Medtronic. We can also bring recognize clinical experts at a national level such as Dr. Rui Vaz and Dr. João Massano.

INESC TEC strong research and innovation capabilities are only possible due to a strong infrastructure of systems (open source data repository, fMRI simulator, high power computing center,…) and services that we also are able to bring to the consortium, such as our ethical and data management offices and also our Intellectual property and business creation management departments.