Neuralynx for Translational Research

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this project is to purchase a state of the art system to collect high- bandwidth multi-scale neurophysiologic data to understand functional networks in the human brain in health and disease. The equipment will form the core of a multi- disciplinary team of investigators in the fields of Neuroscience, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychology, Computational Neuroscience, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It will also dramatically increase the productivity of an international, multi-university collaborative research network we have established to collect and share human neurophysiologic data for research worldwide through the NINDS-funded International Epilepsy Neurophysiology Database. Major areas of research focus in our investigative team include epilepsy, memory and cognition, hearing, cortical dysplasia and movement disorders. Our collaborative group has been extremely productive to date, but relies on data gathered primarily at other sites, such as the Mayo Clinic, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. The equipment consists of a 256 channel, Neuralynx data acquisition and processing system, and 48 Terabytes of RAID storage to archive, process and share data. The project is a close collaboration between the Penn School of Medicine, where patients implanted with intracranial electrodes during evaluation for epilepsy surgery will be cared for, investigators throughout the university who craft studies to look at data coming from these patients, and the School of Engineering, where expertise for collecting, processing, archiving and analyzing these types of large, high-resolution data sets resides. Purchasing this equipment will dramatically expand our collaborative group at UPenn, and our research output, as it is currently limited by the availability of microelectrode data from other institutions. We are also poised to test prototypes of exciting new flexible, active electrode devices we have developed here at Penn, and the timing of this NCRR award will be synchronized with some of these first new human implants.