Serafeim Loukas

• Postdoctoral researcher at UNIGE. PhD in Electrical Engineering (EPFL), Master of Engineering (NTUA), Master of Science (UNIGE)
• Post-doctoral research scientist at University of Geneva

Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) provide special equipment designed to give life support for the increasing number of prematurely born infants and assure their survival. More recently NICU's strive to include developmentally oriented care and modulate sensory input for preterm infants. Music, among other sensory stimuli, has been introduced int...

Premature birth has been associated with poor neurodevelopmental outcomes. However, the relation between such outcomes and brain growth in the neonatal period has not yet been fully elucidated. This study investigates longitudinal brain development between birth and term-equivalent age (TEA) by quantitative imaging in a cohort of premature infants...

Music is known to induce emotions and activate associated memories, including musical memories. In adults, it is well known that music activates both working memory and limbic networks. We have recently discovered that as early as during the newborn period, familiar music is processed differently from unfamiliar music. The present study evaluates m...

Premature birth affects brain maturation, illustrated by altered brain functional connectivity at term equivalent age (TEA) and alters neurobehavioral outcome. To correct early developmental differences and improve neurological outcome, music during the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) stay has been proposed as an auditory enrichment with modula...

Music is ubiquitous, both in its instrumental and vocal forms. While speech perception at birth has been at the core of an extensive corpus of research, the origins of the ability to discriminate instrumental or vocal melodies is still not well investigated. In previous studies comparing vocal and musical perception, the vocal stimuli were mainly r...

Background Functional neurological disorder (FND) is a common neuropsychiatric condition with established diagnostic criteria and effective treatments but for which the underlying neuropathophysiological mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed FND as a multi-network brain disorder, unveiling alterations...

Background Functional neurological disorders were historically regarded as the manifestation of a dynamic brain lesion which might be linked to trauma or stress, although this association has not yet been directly tested yet. Analysing large-scale brain network dynamics at rest in relation to stress biomarkers assessed by salivary cortisol and amyl...

Background Disrupted sense of agency (SoA)—the sense of being the agent of one’s own actions—has been demonstrated in patients with functional neurological disorder (FND), and a key area of the corresponding neuronal network is the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). Several functional MRI (fMRI) studies have found hypoactivation as well as hype...

Objective Prematurity is associated with a high risk of long‐term behavioral problems. This study aimed to assess the prognostic utility of volumetric brain data at term‐equivalent‐age (TEA), clinical perinatal factors, and parental social economic risk in the prediction of the behavioral outcome at 5 years in a cohort of very preterm infants (VPT,...

Stress is a well-known risk factor to develop a functional neurological disorder, a frequent neuropsychiatric medical condition in which patients experience a variety of disabling neurological symptoms. Only little is known about biological stress regulation, and how it interacts with predisposing biological and psychosocial risk factors. Dysregula...

Curriculum_Vitae

Prematurity disrupts brain development during a critical period of brain growth and organization and is known to be associated with an increased risk of neurodevelopmental impairments. Investigating whole-brain structural connectivity alterations accompanying preterm birth may provide a better comprehension of the neurobiological mechanisms related...

In this study we explore the effects of an early intervention on functional connectivity in preterm newborns. A group of preterm newborns underwent musical intervention in NICU during hospitalization. At TEA, two resting-state fMRI runs were collected. The first was before and the second after the presentation of the same musical stimulus used for...

In this study, we combined complex network theory with machine learning in order to grasp potential biomarkers of brain development. The data consists of brain connectomes (brain connectivity matrices) of 53 children aged six years old. For each subject, we estimated brain network-based measures at four different levels: connection, node, module an...

Neural and functional consequences of prematurity warrant for consistent neonatal intensive care unit(NICU) enhancement. Appropriate environmental enrichment has been shown to have a positive impact on behavioral states and brain development. Over the past decade, music in NICU has been shown to have positive impact on physiological and behavioral...