News

UMRAM  hosted the “Basic fMRI Course” on 16 -17 March  which was organized by Assoc. Prof. Orhan Murat Kocak of The Psychiatric Association of Turkey (PAT)  Ankara Branch.The course has started with a technical briefing about MRI Scanners given by our MR technician Mr.Musa Kurnaz. After that an imaging practice session was held using the experimental paradigm of the functional imaging study entitled  “OCD motor system” that is being carried out in UMRAM. Then  the analysis of the acquired data had been discussed in detail throughout the day.

UMRAM faculty, Dr. Huseyin Boyaci has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychology in Bilkent University. Promotion to associate professor is a distinct honor reserved for faculty members who demonstrated consistently outstanding achievement in teaching and research. Dr. Boyaci is a graduate of Bilkent University. After receiving his PhD, he joined New York University as post-doctoral fellow. Later he continued his studies at University Minnesota at Twin Cities. He has been with Bilkent since 2008. More information about Dr. Boyaci can be found in this web site (Home / People / Faculty).

TUBITAK 47 Science Awards has been given to their recipients at a ceremony in Cankaya Presidential Palace under the auspices of President Abdullah Gül. Ass. Prof. Katja Doerschner of UMRAM had been awarded  TUBITAK encouragement prize for her works in the field of ‘the functioning and the development of the human visual system’  and Professor Tayfun Ozcelik of Bilkent University, Molecular Biology Department and the Dean of Science Faculty has received TUBITAK Science  award due to his significant contributions to the field of genetics.

The fast approaching year of 2013 has been celebrated  in UMRAM at a party that is held with a large number of participants. We would like to extend our warmest new year wishes once more to everybody especially to the ones who has honored us by coming to UMRAM to celebrate the new year with us. At the same party we also had the opportunity of toasting our glasses for the well deserved success of our dedicated researcher Katja Doerschner for receiving TUBITAK prize of encouragement.

A US patent has been issued on reduction of implant heating during magnetic resonance examination. Excessive heating of cardiac pacemaker is a significant problem in magnetic resonance imaging. This prohibits patients with implants to be examined  with this powerful imaging technique. Yigitcan Eryaman and Ergin Atalar have addressed this problem by adjusting the applied electromagnetic field in way that minimizing the implant heating. A US patent filed on this subject was filed on Mar 31, 2010 and issued on Nov 27, 2012 with patent number 8,319,496. The text of the patent can be found in the following link.

The work of former students of Prof. Ergin Atalar, Axel Krieger and late Robert Susil was filed as patent application in 2003. After a long process, a US patent was issued with patent number of 8,244,327. The patent was licensed to Sentinelle  Medical which is acquired by Hologic, Inc. In this work, Axel and Robert developed a MR guided needle insertion system. In addition, the work by Perry Karmarkar and Ergin Atalar received a US patent with patent number of 8, 260,399. In this patent, a catheter that can be placed inside heart to inject therapeutic agents to the heart muscle with the aim of repairing the damage in the muscle was described. This novel design is visible under Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

We had a farewell party for our researchers Emre Kopanoglu and Burak Akın who have left UMRAM after completing their graduate studies. Emre is going to continue his researches in Yale University in Boston USA as a postdoctoral fellow and Burak will be studying towards Ph.D. degree in Freiburg University, Germany. They will be missed dearly.

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Dr. Katja Doerschner received 2012 TUBITAK  Encouragement Award in the field of social sciences. In addition, UMRAM collaborator and the Dean of Faculty of Science Prof. Tayfun Ozcelik received the Science Award in the field of health sciences.   The Encouragement Awards are given every year for the young scientists who has potential to contribute to science in the international level and the Science Awards are given the scientists who have contributed to science in the international level. This year Encouragement Awards are given to 11 young scientists and the Science Awards are given to 3 scientists.

Professor Kader Karli Oguz of UMRAM has received a notice of grant award from TUBITAK. Her project is entitled “ASSESSMENT OF RESTING-STATE FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING AND DIFFUSION TENSOR IMAGING FINDINGS AND CORRELATION WITH PROGNOSIS AFTER SURGERY IN REFRACTORY TEMPORAL LOBE EPILEPSY.” Her  project’s abstract is as follows: Although temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), the most frequent type of focal epilepsy in adults has a variety of causes including ischemia, tumour and malformations, hippocampal sclerosis (HS) is the most common cause of TLE in surgical series. Usually it can be diagnosed reliably with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In these patients, language and memory impairments correlating with hippocampal atrophy on MRI, also supported by histopathological studies occur depending on the affected hemisphere. Structural and functional abnormalities in HS extend beyond the hippocampi, even the limbic system. It is generally believed that language and memory impairments are associated with abnormalities in functional and white matter network in which hippocampi take part. However association of these interactions with clinical symptoms of the patients, extension of the differences from healthy individuals and relation with postoperative prognosis remain unclear.  

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Dr. Katja Doerschner and her colleagues received a TUBITAK 1001 grant. The title of the grant is “Assessing structural and functional architecture of the human brain through investigating influences of genetically rooted central nervous system disorders.” Dr. Doerschner summarizes her 3 year plan as: One of the fundamental insights in the study of the mind has been the concept of cortical functional localization. This idea saw its first scientific support through the seminal work by Paul Broca who discovered that speech production was localized to the left ventroposterior frontal gyrus, and set a milestone in in our understanding of the human cognitive facility of language. His discovery validated the search for specialized cortical areas and processes subserving specific cognitive functions such as memory or object perception. To study the brains of lesioned patients, as pioneered by Broca, in order to gain insights into the function of the healthy human brain has since then been the hallmark of With the completion of the human genome project and the recent possibilities of highly advanced sequencing technologies (Green et al. 2011) the identification of genes underlying neurodevelomental disorders has become feasible. From the perspective of neuropsychology studying inherited change in the structure or function of the brain have proven as informative to normal cognitive organization as have acquired lesions. Thus, connecting these two links provides a unique opportunity for establishing a connection between gene expression, cortical structure and complex behavior. In the here proposed work we wish to investigate the visual behavior, structural and functional cortical architecture of an individual with an autosomal recessive single gene mutation (Barak et al. 2011) that causes malformations in occipital cortical development. We conducted preliminary measurements on this cooperative 36 year old female patient, based on which we developed the following three specific aims for this project: 1. Detailed quantitative cortical morphometric measurements 2. General functional and structural connectivity analysis 3. Behavioral and functional experiments examining visual motion perception and visuo-spatial attention To the best of our knowledge this is the first case that the visual system of such an individual will be examined in depth. In addition to advancing our understanding how the human mind works, findings of this research will be of high relevance at the community level since they may have direct applications to human health, for example in predicting and diagnosing visual disorders, or by improving treatments through the development of neuroprosthetic devices. The human visual system is unparalleled in its ability to extract meaningful structure from the retinal input. Therefore, understanding how it accomplishes this will also aid the design of artificial intelligent mobile agents and new computing architectures This project will integrate psychophysical experimentation and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), with the knowledge gained from genetic analysis, thus our approach will be in line with recent call in Science (Akil et al. 2010) to combine efforts from the fields of genomics and neuroscience in the quest for understanding, treating and preventing neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric illness.

Volkan Acikel received a travel grant to present the theory of a implant heating model in the upcoming the second workshop on EMF and Health Risk Research which is organized by IT`IS foundation. Meeting will be between Oct 22-26, 2012 in Monte Verita, Switzerland.