Facilities and Resources

Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics, The Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics (CNT) was founded in November 2013 with a joint $6 million investment from the Schools of Medicine and Engineering in November 2013, with Dr. Litt as its inaugural director. The center provides a focus for Neuroengineering Translational research on campus, linking all of Penn’s schools and branches, including the Wistar Institute and school of Veterinary Medicine, and industrial partners working together on translation and commercialization. The CNT resides in over 3,000 square feet of collaborative “dry” research space situated midway between the schools of Medicine and Engineering for interdisciplinary trainees, an active seminar series, journal club, and daily interactions between PhD students in Engineering, Neuroscience, and physicians and medical trainees from the School of Medicine. The CNT will sponsor an undergraduate concentration in Neuroengineering beginning in 2015, and a new collaborative Master’s program between the Schools of Medicine, Engineering and Business (Wharton). The CNT has grown out of a central collaborative group run by Dr. Brian Litt, housing 25 graduate students, undergrads, PhD students, clinician-scientists, staff and faculty dedicated to Translational Neuroengineering.

The International Epilepsy Electrophysiology Data Portal:  http://ieeg.orgIEEG.org is an open-source cloud-based platform developed at the University of Pennsylvania to share large time-series datasets, promote research collaborations and facilitate Big Data analysis on the cloud. It features over 2000 EEG and imaging datasets and has over 2800 users worldwide. It was funded to support research on intracranial data from humans and animal models of epilepsy, and it rapidly branched out to other research areas and groups, including those in the cognitive, brain-computer interface, Bioelectronics, TBI, and Deep Brain Stimulation communities.

IEEG.org provides automated methods to import, wrangle and analyze data with permission-controlled access to datasets. This allows users to share data within a select workgroup, or make the data public if desired. Researchers, clinicians and industry partners use IEEG.org to securely share data with collaborators and to analyze data locally and on the cloud. IEEG.org, NINDS, the American Epilepsy Society and NIPS sponsored two crowd-sourced contests, that together offered $35,000 in prize money, to develop algorithms for seizure detection and prediction, using data on IEEG.org in collaboration with Kaggle, Inc.  The contests produced algorithms for seizure detection and prediction with performance much greater than any detailed in the literature to date.

Data is accessible through a web-client and through API’s with commonly used data analytics platforms. We currently have a toolbox for MATLAB and we also have designed tools for Python. In addition, we are developing sophisticated key-word search capabilities, allowing users to find datasets, and features within datasets and supporting documents. IEEG.org is managed and directed by Drs. Brian Litt, Zack Ives, Joost Wagenaar, and Gregory Worrell, Professors in Neurology, Computer Science and Engineering at University of Pennsylvania and Mayo Clinic at the Portal’s inception.  These investigators are currently supporting a variety of NIH, DARPA and industry funded projects using the platform as a means of sharing data and rigorously validating research and results from Neuroengineering, Neuroprosthestics and other research efforts that utilize large times series, neurobehavioral and imaging data.