Neural prostheses have already a long history and yet the cochlear implant remains the only success story about a longterm sensory function restoration. On the other hand, neural implants for deep brain stimulation are gaining acceptance for variety of disorders including Parkinsons disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is anticipated that the progress in the field has been hampered by ...

A number of brain diseases, e.g. movement disorders such as Parkinsons disease, are characterized by abnormal neuronal synchronization. Within the last years permanent high-frequency (HF) deep brain stimulation became the standard therapy for medically refractory movement disorders. To overcome limitations of standard HF deep brain stimulation, we use a model based approach. To this end, we mak...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established therapy for the treatment of movement disorders, and has shown promising results for the treatment of a wide range of other neurological disorders. However, little is known about the mechanism of action of DBS or the volume of brain tissue affected by stimulation. We have developed methods that use anatomical and diffusion tensor MRI (DTI) data to ...

Parkinsons disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer’s, affecting about 1% of the people older than 65 and about 89% of the people with PD develop different speech disorders. Different researchers are currently working in the analysis of speech of people with PD, including the study of different dimensions in speech such as phonation, articulation, pro...

Human motion analysis and assessment are important in determining Parkinsons disease and stroke, or in measuring skill quality in basic motions. Reduced space is useful in representing motion segments and finding basic behavioral patterns for humanoid robot control using the modularized approach. In the current paper, we represent motion-captured data of human action in a reduced space of nonli...

Electrochemical analysis of nucleic acids, proteins and polysaccharides represents an interesting, although not widely spread alternative to current methods based predominantly on optical detection because it offers a relatively inexpensive, fast and instrumentally simple detection of parallel samples on miniaturized chips, ideal for personalized medicine of the 21st century. Nucleic acid elect...

Objective: The aim of this study is to develop a smartphone-based high-frequency remote monitoring platform, assess its feasibility for remote monitoring of symptoms in Parkinsons disease, and demonstrate the value of data collected using the platform by detecting dopaminergic medication response. Methods: We have developed HopkinsPD, a novel smartphonebased monitoring platform, which measures ...

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has evolved into a well-accepted add-on treatment for patients with severe Parkinsons disease as well as for other chronic neurological conditions. The focal action of electrical stimulation can yield better responses and it exposes the patient to fewer side effects compared to pharmaceuticals distributed throughout the body toward the brain. On the other hand, the ...

Parkinson's disease (PD) and essential tremor (ET) are characterized with motor dysfunctions. Motor circuit dysfunctions can be complementarily investigated by paired associative stimulation (PAS)-induced long-term potentiation (LTP)-like plasticity and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the corticospinal tract (CST). Three groups of twelve subjects with moderate severity PD, ET with intention t...

Research of the past 25 years has shown that astrocytes do more than participating and building up the blood-brain barrier and detoxify the active synapse by reuptake of neurotransmitters and ions. Indeed, astrocytes express neurotransmitter receptors and, as a consequence, respond to stimuli. Within the tripartite synapse, the astrocytes owe more and more importance. Besides the functional asp...