scash

A massive CONGRATULATIONS to Prof. Sydney S. Cash for becoming the Division Chief for the Clinical Neurophysiology Division at Massachusetts General Hospital!!!!

In a celebration of Prof. Andy Cole’s service and efforts to grow the epilepsy monitoring unit into a Clinical Neurophysiology Division over many years, we also heard the fantastic news that Dr. Cash will be taking the lead of the world-class Clinical Neurophysiology Division at Massachusetts General Hospital. We all look forward to his leadership and creativity in moving forward such a fantastic, groundbreaking division!!!

Photos are of Prof. Merit Cudkowicz (Chief, Neurology Department), Assistant Prof. Alice Lam, Associate Prof. Marcello Matiello, and Prof. Andy Cole along with Prof. Sydney Cash talking about both the inspiring, excellent, and high quality leadership and mentorship that Prof. Andy Cole displayed as Division Chief and the excitement of Prof. Cash taking on this role moving forward!

We also got to get some photos of members of the Department of Neurology Clinical Neurophysiology Division and Cash lab members who got to attend!

Congratulations to the Williams and Cash lab teams on the Nature paper on Speech encoding by single neurons using Neuropixels probes!

Congratulations to the team on a new Nature paper on uncovering the basic mechanisms of speech and phonemes encoded by single brain cells in the human brain! With data gathered using the Neuropixels probes, the team was able to uncover the neural mechanisms of how brain cells in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can code for words about to be produced by patient participants in the operating room. This work could help uncover fundamental features of how our brain produces language!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06982-w

Khanna AR, Muñoz W, Kim YJ, Kfir Y, Paulk AC, Jamali M, Cai J, Mustroph ML, Caprara I, Hardstone R, Mejdell M, Meszéna D, Zuckerman A, Schweitzer J, Cash S, Williams ZM. Single-neuronal elements of speech production in humans. Nature. 2024 Jan 31. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06982-w. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 38297120.

And a news and views discussion of this and another, relevant article from the Chang lab at UCSF:

How speech is produced and perceived in the human cortex

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00078-9

Congratulations to the team and our colleagues at IEBL UCSD and the Dayeh lab for a new publication on microSEEG electrodes!

Congratulations to everyone on the article, “Flexible, scalable, high channel count stereo-electrode for recording in the human brain”. In this multi-year journey to develop novel, scalable thin film penetrating depth electrodes to advance the field by leaps and bounds, the Dayeh lab and the IEBL lab at UCSD has worked with the Cash lab along with the Pezaris, Fried, Williams, and Richardson labs of Thier 4 at MGH to test whether we could capture biologically relevant neural activity using these new devices. In this article in Nature Communications, we show the unique capabilities of these devices including recording brain activity in four species in both acute and chronic recording settings. We hope this advance will move forward our ability to record brain activity at high resolution particularly in the clinical setting.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43727-9 

Video illustrating these electrodes

https://youtu.be/FaPVXddg6mE

Press release from UCSD:

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/transforming-clinical-recording-of-deep-brain-activity-with-a-new-take-on-sensor-manufacturing

Dr. Sydney Cash, MD, PhD, has been promoted from Associate Professor to Professor at MGH and Harvard Medical School!!!!! The lab celebrated his well-deserved promotion with cake and speeches. Prof. Cash has been an inspiring and incredible medical doctor, mentor, teacher, and all-around excellent lab head. Thank you, Prof. Cash!

Moving new neurotechnologies into the clinical space to better understand the human brain takes a considerable amount of effort, time, and a team of neuroscientists, clinicians, researchers, engineers, and clinical staff. It also requires substantial attention to regulatory pathways and neuroethical considerations. In a major step forward Brian Coughlin, Angelique C. Paulk and others share a detailed protocol for using the powerful and revolutionary high resolution Neuropixels probe in the human operating room with patient participants in a Nature Protocols article providing a framework for safe application and use of Neuropixels to record human brain activity at unprecedented resolution.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-023-00871-2

Publication:

Coughlin B, Muñoz W, Kfir Y, Young MJ, Meszéna D., Jamali M, Caprara I, Hardstone R, Khanna A, Mustroph ML, Trautmann EM, Windolf C, Varol E, Soper DJ, Stavisky SD, Welkenhuysen M, Dutta B, Shenoy KV, Hochberg LR, Richardson RM, Williams ZM, Cash SS, Paulk AC (2023). Modified Neuropixels probes for recording human neurophysiology in the operating room. Nature Protocols. doi: 10.1038/s41596-023-00871-2. Epub ahead of print

Congratulations to Rina Zelmann and authors on their new article in Neuron entitled “Differential cortical network engagement during states of un/consciousness in humans”.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.08.007

What happens in the human brain when we are unconscious? What happens when we are unarousable? Using electrical stimulation and recordings from inside the human brain Dr. Zelmann, Dr. Cash, and colleagues in the departments of Neurology, Anesthesia, and Neurosurgery provide direct experimental evidence that during unconsciousness, such as natural sleep, the human brain is uniformly affected, while lack of arousability during general anesthesia, is linked to a profound disruption of function and connectivity in prefrontal regions.

Zelmann R, Paulk AC, Tian F, Balanza Villegas GA, Dezha Peralta J, Crocker B, Cosgrove GR, Richardson RM, Williams ZM, Dougherty DD, Purdon PL, Cash SS. Differential cortical network engagement during states of un/consciousness in humans. Neuron. 2023 Aug 29:S0896-6273(23)00618-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2023.08.007. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 37659409.

Congratulations on two new papers on intracranial electrode localization in humans from us and others!
1. SEEGAtlas: A framework for the identification and classification of depth electrodes using clinical images
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/acd6bd

SEEGAtlas was developed by Rina Zelmann at McGill in Montreal as a plugin in the Ibis Neuronav software package enabling multiple imaging tools to locate electrodes:
github.com/IbisNeuronav: https://github.com/IbisNeuronav
SEEGAtlas plugin: https://github.com/IbisNeuronav/IbisPluginsExtraSEEG

2. Modular pipeline for reconstruction and localization of implanted intracranial ECoG and sEEG electrodes
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287921

For the second paper, Dan Soper lead a paper laying out our recon approach used on more than 200 patients which is also an online protocol (below) which was built to help naive users make use of the modular approaches we use involving multiple software packages. This also includes a MMVT-lite thanks to Noam’s and others efforts which can be installed an used for electrode localization. Congrats to Dan and the whole team!

Protocol: https://www.protocols.io/view/modular-reconstruction-and-co-registration-of-imag-5qpvornedv4o/v2

Pariya Salami, Ph.D. and Rina Zelmann, Ph.D. were promoted this past summer to the positions of Instructors in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in Harvard Medical School. These well-deserved promotions are credits to their work in understanding seizures, epilepsy, neural signals, stimulation, and closing the loop to neural activity. They both have guided and taught multiple students, fellows, and laboratory technicians over the years in recording from and understanding the brain.

Below are just a few of their publications with more to come!

Salami P, Peled N, Nadalin JK, Martinet LE, Kramer MA, Lee JW, Cash SS. Seizure onset location shapes dynamics of initiation. Clin Neurophysiol. 2020 Aug;131(8):1782-1797. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2020.04.168.

Salami P, Borzello M, Kramer MA, Westover MB, Cash SS (2022) Quantifying seizure termination patterns reveals limited pathways to seizure end. Neurobiol Dis. (2022). 165:105645. doi: 10.1016/j.nbd.2022.105645.

Krempp C, Paulk AC, Truccolo W, Cash SS, Zelmann R. Effect of Closed-Loop Direct Electrical Stimulation during Sleep Spindles in Humans. Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2020 Jul;2020:3586-3589. DOI: 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9175404.

Zelmann R, Paulk AC, Basu I, Sarma A, Yousefi A, Crocker B, Eskandar E, Williams Z, Cosgrove GR, Weisholtz DS, Dougherty DD, Truccolo W, Widge AS, Cash SS. CLoSES: A platform for closed-loop intracranial stimulation in humans. Neuroimage. 2020 Dec;223:117314. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117314.

Adam Khalifa, Ph.D. (right, pictured with Syd Cash, left) has started his new laboratory in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida! Laboratory website: https://khalifa.ece.ufl.edu/

His team will be investigating and developing novel tools for recording and modulating brain activity, with a relevant publication below:

Khalifa A, Zaeimbashi M, Zhou TX, Abrishami SM, Sun N, Park S, Šumarac T, Qu J, Zohar I, Yacoby A, Cash S, Sun NX (2021) The development of microfabricated solenoids with magnetic cores for micromagnetic neural stimulation. Nat Microsystems Nanoeng 7:91. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-021-00320-8

Jimmy Yang, M.D. has started his laboratory at Ohio State University in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the Wexener Medical Center

https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/find-a-doctor/jimmy-yang-md-139760

Yang JC, Harid NM, Nascimento FA, Kokkinos V, Shaughnessy A, Lam AD, Westover MB, Leslie-Mazwi TM, Hochberg LR, Rosenthal ES, Cole AJ, Richardson RM, Cash SS. Responsive neurostimulation for focal motor status epilepticus. Ann Clin Transl Neurol. 2021 May 6. doi: 10.1002/acn3.51318.

Congrats to the team on the publication “Learned Motor Patterns Are Replayed in Human Motor Cortex during Sleep” in The Journal of Neuroscience! Rubin et al. examined single unit activity to examine whether there is motor replay of learned motor patterns in the brain activity of someone sleeping after learning the new patterns. By decoding neural activity throughout subsequent sleep, they found that the could identify neural sequences underlying the recently practiced motor task are repeated throughout the night, providing direct evidence of replay in human motor cortex during sleep. This approach, using an optimized brain–computer interface decoder to characterize neural activity during sleep, provides a framework for future studies exploring replay, learning, and memory. Available at: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/25/5007