Alexander Belsten

Alexander Belsten

PhD Student at UC Berkeley

Research

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine

Invasive Cortical Stimulation

In the Department of Neurosurgery at WashU, I developed a system to explore cortical areas with electrical stimulation via ECoG and SEEG, which significantly improves the efficiency of collecting CCEP (cortico-cortical evoked potentials) data. This system also provides the technical basis to perform closed-loop cortical stimulation over hundreds of electrode sites. It is currently in use at Mayo Clinic and will be adopted by additional institutions, such as the Stanford School of Medicine.

This system is built on BCI2000, g.tec cortical stimulator, and g.tec switching unit.

National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies

At NCAN I worked on maintaining and improving BCI2000, a general purpose software for brain-computer interfacing. I added support for a variety of bio-signal acquisition devices. These devices include:

  • Brain Products actiCHamp Plus
  • Magstim-EGI NA 400 and GTEN 200, Enabling closed-loop transcranial stimulation via EEG
  • Fully implantable telemetry-based CNS monitor and stimulator for small laboratory animals

I also improved support for peripheral inputs to BCI2000 such as parallel port recording and webcam devices.

Accepted Papers

Hardware Abstraction to Facilitate the Dissemination and Validation of Electrophysiological Experiments, Alexander Belsten, Markus Adamek, Peter Brunner. One-page research paper and presentation accepted at 42nd EMBC 2020 conference.

Discussed the necessity of an abstraction layer over heterogeneous bio-signal hardware and how that abstraction layer enables collaboration and the validation of electrophysiological experiments.

Bio-Inspired Fly-by-Feel Aerospace Vehicles

Designed a multi-branch one-dimensional convolutional neural network to predict the flight state of fly-by-feel aircraft using data recorded from the surface of an airfoil. Interested in why a specific architecture has better, or worse, results and what those results can tell us about the system’s dynamics and information present at each sensor. Abstract detailing preliminary results submitted to 2021 AIAA AVIATION forum.

Oat Milk Research

Work in progress… Come back soon.