https://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. To map the mammalian brain and its various functions with increasing precision, neuroscientists rely on high-resolution imaging techniques and other advanced experimental tools. These now include high-density silicon probes, needle-like devices integrating several thousand electrodes that can be inserted into brain tissue to pick up voltage changes associated with the firing of neurons. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08-probe-reliably-large-neuron-populations.html Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:05 EDT news673864867 The mechanisms underlying intellectual disabilities or autism remain largely unknown. Researchers in the labs of Prof. Pierre Vanderhaeghen and Prof. Vincent Bonin at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and NERF have discovered that mutations in a gene called SYNGAP1 disrupt the prolonged development of human neurons, which is thought to be essential for normal cognitive function. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-links-premature-human-neurons-brain.html Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:00:01 EDT news642154490 The central (CNS) and peripheral (PNS) nervous system work together to coordinate and regulate the functions of our body in addition to hosting our human intelligence. The CNS is the control center and includes the brain and the spinal cord. While the brain processes information, makes decisions, and sends out instructions, the spinal cord and the associated PNS is the communication highway that carries nerve signals to and from the brain. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-pills-pulses-electrifying-medicine-peripheral.html Thu, 15 Feb 2024 14:49:07 EST news627230941 Imec teamed up with the KU Leuven laboratory of tumor immunology and immunotherapy for the first clinical validation of its cell sorter chip technology. The chip successfully identified PD-1 positive T cells in the blood samples of 15 ovarian cancer patients, matching the accuracy of the established gold standard in cytometry—bulky and costly flow cytometry instruments like FACS. The work has been publsihed in Cells. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-cytometry-chip-revolution-cancer-personalized.html Fri, 02 Feb 2024 10:39:05 EST news626092741 To examine the human brain and better understand its functions, neuroscientists have so far used a variety of methods to record the electrical activity of brain cells. Traditionally, these methods were either able to record the activity of a few individual neurons at a time or monitor changes in the summated activity of thousands of neurons over time. If researchers wanted to sample from a large population of cells in one area at once, however, they had to employ two or more different techniques. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-protocols-neural-neuropixels-clinical.html Fri, 18 Mar 2022 09:24:14 EDT news566814243 How brain cells communicate with one another remains largely cloaked in mystery, but a probe that records signals from neurons with unprecedented clarity and precision may help unlock those secrets, according to a study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and colleagues at several other institutions. These findings, reported in Nature Neuroscience, could lay the foundation for a better understanding of how the brain works, the origins of neurological diseases and more. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-02-high-resolution-probe-secrets-brain-function.html Mon, 14 Feb 2022 16:24:12 EST news564078248 CWI researchers Bojian Yin and Sander Bohté, together with their colleague Federico Corradi of Stichting Interuniversitair Micro-Elektronica Centrum (IMEC) in Eindhoven, have achieved a mathematical breakthrough in the computation of so-called spiking neural networks. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-10-energy-efficient-ai-heart-defects.html Fri, 15 Oct 2021 10:54:16 EDT news553514046 Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the three so-called trillion-dollar diseases in the world, next to cancer and diabetes. It is expected that in the next 40 years, the number of people diagnosed with AD will triple. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-alzheimer-disease-eyes-hyperspectral-camera.html Tue, 18 May 2021 07:16:19 EDT news540540972 A new generation of miniature recording probes can track the same neurons inside tiny mouse brains over weeks—and even months. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-latest-neuropixels-probes-track-neurons.html Thu, 15 Apr 2021 14:00:03 EDT news537693829 Brain scientists led by Sebastian Haesler (NERF, empowered by IMEC, KU Leuven and VIB) have identified a causal mechanism of how novel stimuli promote learning. Novelty directly activates the dopamine system, which is responsible for associative learning. The findings have implications for improving learning strategies and for the design of machine learning algorithms. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-novelty-dopamine.html Wed, 05 Feb 2020 12:05:22 EST news500126713 A team of scientists led by Karl Farrow at NeuroElectronics Research Flanders (NERF, empowered by imec, KU Leuven and VIB) is unraveling how our brain processes visual information. They identified specific roles for distinct neuronal cell types in passing on information from the eye to downstream brain regions that guide behavior. Such knowledge is essential to understand how sensory information guides our actions and decisions. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-12-relay-networks-brain.html Mon, 02 Dec 2019 08:29:29 EST news494497765 A team of researchers led by Pierre Vanderhaeghen and Vincent Bonin (VIB-KU Leuven, Université libre de Bruxelles and NERF) showed how human nerve cells can develop at their own pace, and form highly precise connections with surrounding mouse brain cells. These findings shed new light on the unique features of the human brain and open new perspectives for brain repair and the study of brain diseases. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-11-transplanting-human-nerve-cells-mouse.html Thu, 21 Nov 2019 12:16:32 EST news493560984 A collaboration between the laboratories of Vincent Bonin (NERF, empowered by VIB, imec and KU Leuven) and Matthew Holt (VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research) reveals that noradrenaline plays a key role in how astrocytes—star-shaped cells in the brain closely associated with neurons—track distinct information during behavior. The researchers found that astrocytes can integrate information on arousal state and sensory experience. The results are published in Current Biology. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-09-insights-astrocytes-brain.html Thu, 12 Sep 2019 10:33:07 EDT news487503182 What happens during an epileptic seizure? A recent study suggests that seizures occur after certain defense cells in the brain break down. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-08-epilepsy-brain-defenses-collapse.html Fri, 23 Aug 2019 09:07:06 EDT news485770018 Spinal cord injury disconnects communication between the brain and the spinal cord, disrupting control over parts of the body. Studying the mechanisms of recovery, Leuven researcher Aya Takeoka (NERF) found that a specific type of neuronal feedback from sites below the injury plays a crucial role during early recovery and for maintaining regained motor functions. These new basic research findings implicate the importance of continued use of affected body parts for rehabilitative success in spinal cord injury patients. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-04-spinal-cord-injury-recovery.html Mon, 08 Apr 2019 09:47:21 EDT news473935632 Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) continue to be a leading cause of death. According to the World Health Organization, more people die annually from CVDs than from any other cause. Since their diagnosis might require specialised testing that could be costly and difficult to perform, the identification of individuals at risk could play a crucial role in early intervention. This is the vision of the EU-funded CARDIS project that has developed a prototype medical device for the diagnosis of various CVDs such as arterial stenosis and heart failure. Its technology is based on silicon photonics. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-mobile-device-instant-diagnosis-heart.html Mon, 11 Mar 2019 09:10:02 EDT news471513051 The rat in a maze may be one of the most classic research motifs in brain science, but a new innovation described in Cell Reports by an international collaboration of scientists shows just how far such experiments are still pushing the cutting edge of technology and neuroscience alike. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-neurotechnology-real-time-readouts-rats.html Tue, 04 Dec 2018 11:00:02 EST news463134162 What we see is not only determined by what is really there, but also depends on whether we are paying attention, whether we are moving, excited or interested. In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists from NERF (Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders) uncover that the processing of visual information in the brain is indeed modulated by our own behavior. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-11-brain-world.html Tue, 20 Nov 2018 08:53:06 EST news461926380 A transformative technology for detecting and recording neural activity in the brain is now available for researchers to purchase through imec, a leading nanoelectronics research center in Belgium. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-10-neuropixels-technology-ready.html Wed, 31 Oct 2018 09:34:08 EDT news460197242 To understand more about how we respond to what we see around us, a team of scientists at NERF has zoomed in on the organization of neurons in the superior colliculus, a midbrain structure that mediates orientation responses to visual cues. They found that neurons with similar selectivity are clustered together and that there is a sharp transition in neuronal selectivity along the border where sensory information from both eyes meets. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-08-visual-behavior.html Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:23:54 EDT news454929831 Neuroscientists who want to follow the nervous system's cellular conversations will soon have access to easy-to-use technology that simultaneously monitors neural activity at hundreds of different sites within the brain, thanks to a major engineering effort funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and Wellcome. The new probes are expected to give scientists a much clearer picture of how different parts of the brain work together to process information. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-11-probe-thinner-human-hair-high.html Wed, 08 Nov 2017 13:00:06 EST news429355954 Navigation in mammals including humans and rodents depends on specialized neural networks that encode the animal's location and trajectory in the environment, serving essentially as a GPS, findings that led to the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Failure of these networks to function properly, as seen in Alzheimer's disease and other neurological conditions, results in severe disorientation and memory deficits. Researchers at NERF (VIB-imec-KU Leuven) have now uncovered striking neural activity patterns in a brain area called the retrosplenial cortex that may assist with spatial memory and navigation. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-spatial-memorynew-brain-region-involved.html Wed, 16 Aug 2017 09:00:04 EDT news422092459 Scientists at NERF (VIB-KU Leuven-imec) have provided fundamental insights into the mechanism of smell localization. This marks an important step in unraveling the entire neural odor localization mechanism, which is highly valuable to the study of memory diseases such as Alzheimer's. The team, led by Prof. Sebastian Haesler, used mice for the experiment, which are smell identification champions. Using a novel non-invasive technique based on infrared technology, they revealed that localizing odors is achieved by comparing information gathered from the left and right nostril. The study is published in the leading scientific journal Current Biology. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-mechanism-rapid-source-localization.html Mon, 22 May 2017 09:00:01 EDT news414661888 Music, more than any art, is a beautiful mix of science and emotion. It follows a set of patterns almost mathematically to extract feelings from its audience. Machines that make music focus on these patterns, but give little consideration to the emotional response of their audience. An international research team led by Osaka University together with Tokyo Metropolitan University, imec in Belgium and Crimson Technology has released a new machine-learning device that detects the emotional state of its listeners to produce new songs that elicit new feelings. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-songs-robots.html Thu, 09 Mar 2017 11:07:07 EST news408280016 Evolutionary conserved brainstem circuits are the first relay for gustatory information in the vertebrate brain. While the brainstem circuits act as our life support system and they mediate vital taste related behaviors, the principles of gustatory computations in these circuits are poorly understood. Researchers at NERF (VIB/KU Leuven/imec) studied how the evolutionary conserved brainstem circuits of zebrafish encode gustatory information. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-12-insights-link-behavior.html Mon, 07 Dec 2015 07:15:23 EST news368694916 At next week's Neuroscience 2014, held Nov. 15-19 in Washington, D.C., nanoelectronics research center imec and Holst Centre will present their next-generation wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headset achieving increased EEG data quality. The headset combines dry electrodes with integrated skin-to-electrode impedance monitoring to provide information about the contact quality throughout the entire EEG recording. Unique signal processing is integrated to cancel out motion artefacts. This breakthrough technology paves the way to wireless EEG monitoring solutions for environments without specialized technical assistance, such as at family doctors, psychiatrists, paramedic care, ICU or even at home. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-breakthrough-qualitative-reliable-eeg.html Thu, 13 Nov 2014 07:10:01 EST news335083976 How do our brains combine information from the external world (sensory stimulation) with information on our internal state such as hunger, fear or stress? NERF scientists demonstrate that the habenula, a specific part in our brain consisting of neural circuits, acts as a gate for sensory information, thus regulating behavior in response to external stimuli. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-02-brain-board-behavior-response-external.html Fri, 14 Feb 2014 07:50:01 EST news311585451