THE SYSTEM HAS BEEN TESTED FOR OVER A YEAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH’S NEUROLOGY DEPARTMENT

A team led by Portuguese researchers have created the first low-cost system in the world that uses 3D video technology to extract body movements during epilepsy seizures. This new system can help health professionals to diagnose patients and define therapies, not only for epilepsy patients, but also for patients with other neurological illnesses, such as Parkinson’s.

The goal now is to take this system – which has been tested for over a year at the University of Munich’s Neurology Department –  to other medical units monitoring epilepsy, and to work together with them for the benefit of the patients. Because this system is affordable, it has the potential to be deployed in multiple epilepsy units around the world, even in developing countries.

The system does not require any reflectors or sensors to be attached to the patient’s body, or any intervention on the bed where the patient is being monitored. This is possible because the system combines high definition video with a high speed infrared radar to obtain 30 3D images per second. The 3D sensors have been synchronised with the brain activity (EEG) of the monitored patient, and are now being used in a real hospital environment, in Munich (Germany), at a medical centre that serves 8 million people in this area of neurology alone.

“Our 3D system can extract body movement trajectories a lot faster than the 2D system used previously and, combined with the EEG, it offers more quantitative information for the physician to diagnose and decide on the most suitable treatment for the  patients”, explains João Paulo Cunha, coordinator of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research (C-BER), of the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), who is in charge of the project.

This work, developed by researchers from INESC TEC, the University of Aveiro, the University of Munich, and the Munich University of Technology, has been published on 22 January in PLoS ONE[1], a publication that, in the Life Sciences & Earth Sciences area on Google Scholar, only comes second to the journals Nature, Science and PNAS in terms of scientific impact metrics.

“Publishing this work in PLoS ONE is recognition of the research we have been conducting on this topic, and could be a gateway for other Portuguese researchers to publish their findings in one of the most relevant journals in the world”, concludes João Paulo Cunha, who also teaches at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP).

For more information:

Joana Desport Coelho

Communication Service                                                                                                                              

INESC TEC

Campus da FEUP

Rua Dr Roberto Frias

4200-465 Porto

Portugal

T +351 22 209 4018

M +351 934 224 331

joana.d.coelho@inesctec.pt

www.inesctec.pt                                                                                                                              

Porto, 25 January 2015

[1]http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0145669