Golan Karvat, a promising doctoral researcher from the Optophysiology lab led by BrainLinks-BrainTools member Prof. Dr. Ilka Diester, won the Best Paper Award in the 2019 Göttingen meeting of the German Neuroscience Society. The talk, titled “LFP-burst based real-time neurofeedback in rats”, was presented in the Breaking News symposium, and selected as the best talk according to the criteria: novelty of findings presented, potential impact on future research and the quality of the presentation.
The project was led by Golan Karvat and Prof. Dr. Ilka Diester in collaboration with the BLBT members of Dr. Tangermann’s Brain State Decoding Lab and Prof. Dr. Thomas Brox’ Computer Vision Group. The scientists detected short-lasting bursts of oscillations in the local-field-potential (LFP) in freely moving rats in real-time. The rats were rewarded upon detection of bursts, and within two weeks of training, they learned to increase the rate of bursts and power of the targeted frequencies (neurofeedback). In addition, the occurrence of LFP-bursts was decoded from the rats‘ movement by a machine learning algorithm. This innovative work can pave the way for better understanding of the role of LFP in behavior, as well as designing future brain-machine-interface algorithms.