Vinicius Cota

• BSc, PhD
• Researcher at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

Our working hypothesis is that constant interpulse interval (IPI) electrical stimulation would resonate with endogenous epileptogenic reverberating circuits, inducing seizures, whereas a random interinterval electrical stimulation protocol would promote desynchronization of such neural networks, producing an anticonvulsant effect. Male Wistar rats...

Closed-loop electrical stimulation of brain structures is one of the most promising techniques to suppress epileptic seizures in drug-resistant refractory patients who are also ineligible to ablative neurosurgery. In this work, an intelligent controller is presented to block the aberrant activity of a network of Izhikevich neurons of three differen...

Background: Synchronization across neural circuits is inextricably associated with brain function and pathology. Although not largely explored, this framework can be applied to baseline anxiety and its disorder, which is characterized by aberrant levels of synchronization between the amygdala nuclei and other areas of the extended amygdala, particu...

Rationalized development of electrical stimulation (ES) therapy is of paramount importance. Not only it will foster new techniques and technologies with increased levels of safety, efficacy, and efficiency, but it will also facilitate the translation from basic research to clinical practice. For such endeavor, design of new technologies must dialog...

Neuroprostheses are neuroengineering devices that have an interface with the nervous system and supplement or substitute functionality in people with disabilities. In the collective imagination, neuroprostheses are mostly used to restore sensory or motor capabilities, but in recent years, new devices directly acting at the brain level have been pro...

Goal: This study addresses the inherent difficulties in the creation of neuroengineering devices for real-time neural signal processing, a task typically characterized by intricate and technically demanding processes. Beneath the substantial hardware advancements in neurotechnology, there is often rather complex low-level code that poses challenges...

The brain is one of the most intriguing and complex systems we know so far. The quest to decipher its intricate workings continues to captivate scientists and researchers worldwide. By comprehending the brain’s capacities, functions, connectivity, origins, and development, we open doors to precise health treatments and technological advancements th...

Epilepsy is a worldwide public health issue, given its biological, social, and economic impacts. Considering several open questions about synchronization and desynchronization mechanisms underlying epileptic phenomena, the development of algorithms and computational toolboxes for such analysis is highly relevant to their research. Moreover, given t...

The objective and automatic detection of the sleep–wake cycle (SWC) stages is essential for the investigation of its physiology and dysfunction. Here, we propose a machine learning model for the classification of SWC stages based on the measurement of synchronization between neural oscillations of different frequencies. Publicly available electroph...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Latin American Workshop, LAWCN 2023, held in Envigado, Colombia, during November 28–30, 2023. The 8 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: artificial intelligence and m...

One of the most promising alternatives to suppress epileptic seizures in drug-resistant and neurosurgery-refractory patients is using electro-electronic devices. By applying an appropriate pulsatile electrical stimulation, the process of ictogenesis can be quickly suppressed. However, in designing such stimulation devices, a common problem is defin...

Despite considerable advancement of first choice treatment (pharmacological, physical therapy, etc.) over many decades, neurological disorders still represent a major portion of the worldwide disease burden. Particularly concerning, the trend is that this scenario will worsen given an ever expanding and aging population. The many different methods...

This study addresses the inherent difficulties in the creation of neuroengineering devices for closed-loop stimulation, a task typically characterized by intricate and technically demanding processes. Beneath the substantial hardware advancements in neurotechnology, there is often rather complex low-level code that poses challenges in terms of deve...

In this work, we computed sleep-wake cycle (SWC) stage-specific cross-frequency couplings in order to identify patterns of neural synchronization with neurobiological relevance. This may be used for the control of neuroengineering systems capable of delivering personalized therapeutic electrical stimulation according to relevant sleep events.

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders worldwide. Recent findings suggest that the brain is a complex system composed of a network of neurons, and seizure is considered an emergent property resulting from its interactions. Based on this perspective, network physiology has emerged as a promising approach to explore how brain areas...

Collection of selected papers submitted and presented at the III Latin American Workshop on Computational Neuroscience (LAWCN'21), held in the city of São Luís do Maranhão, Brazil, from 8 to 10th December 2021. Papers have been peer-reviewed and selected for their superior quality and impact. Topics covered are within the areas of Computational Neu...

O Hardware aberto tem o potencial de auxiliar escritórios de transferência de tecnologia a ma-ximizar o impacto da tecnologia acadêmica PONTOS-CHAVE:. O hardware aberto permite que Escritórios de Transferência de Tecnolo-gia (ETTs) de universidades explorem o potencial de produções acadêmi-cas já existentes e que não se ajustam ao atual paradigma d...

Based on the rationale that neural hypersynchronization underlies epileptic phenomena, nonperiodic stimulation (NPS) was designed and successfully tested as an electrical stimulus with robust anticonvulsant action. Considering the scale-free temporal structure of NPS mimics natural-like activity, here we hypothesized its application to the amygdala...

Computational modeling is a powerful tool to investigate the mechanisms of neural function. This work model in silico the effect of experimental electrical stimulation on a neuronal network of the basolateral amygdala. Starting from the premise that different temporal patterns of stimulation affect in different ways the behavior of neural circuits...

Electrical stimulation of neural tissue is a well-established method in neurosciences for the investigation of neural function, neurological disorders, and neuromodulation therapies. Although one can easily find a great variety of off-the-shelf equipment for such experimentation, recent developments of the field, such as a precision neuroengineerin...

Electrical stimulation of the brain is a largely used alternative for the treatment of myriad neurological disorders. Although recognizably efficacious and safe, many details of the underlying mechanisms remain obscure. Our group devised and successfully tested, in animal models of epilepsy, a novel nonstandard form of electrical stimulation in whi...

The Latin American Workshop on Computational Neuroscience (LAWCN) was born in 2017 and it is devoted to address themes such as Computational Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, and Neuroengineering. It has been biennially holding since: I LAWCN (2017) in Porto Alegre (Brazil) and II LAWCN (2019) in São João Del-Rei (Brazil). Due to...

Studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects of light-and moderate-intensity physical exercise on the nervous system of animals with cerebral ischemia. To investigate the effects of two high-intensity physical exercise protocols, standardized for resistance and strength gain, in rats trained before cerebral ischemia induced by Bilateral Common...

Electrical Stimulation (ES) of the nervous system is a promising alternative to treat refractory epilepsy. Recent developments in the area have led to a novel method involving a non-standard form of electrical stimulation with randomized inter-pulse intervals called non-periodic stimulation (NPS). Although it is an interesting approach, there is li...

1. Open hardware provides an opportunity for Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) at universities to exploit the potential of existing academic outputs that do not fit in the current patent-and-licence technology transfer paradigm. 2. It is possible for TTOs to adopt open hardware as part of their technology transfer toolbox today. 3. As seen with th...

Epilepsy is the second most prevalent brain disorder affecting approximately 70 million people worldwide. A modern approach to developing the brain study is to model it as a system of systems, represented by a network of oscillators, in which the emergent property of synchronization occurs. Based on this perspective, epileptic seizures are processe...

PurposeThe usage of open-source hardware (OSH) designs has been put forward as a means to mitigate the shortage of core medical equipment, such as ventilators and of personal protection equipment (PPE) in medical facilities worldwide, resulting from the ever increasing number of individuals affect by COVID-19. This is due to the model allowing for...

The understanding that hyper-excitability and hyper-synchronism in epilepsy are indissociably bound by a cause-consequence relation has only recently been challenged. Thus, therapeutic strategies for seizure suppression have often aimed at inhibiting excitatory circuits and/or activating inhibitory ones. However, new approaches that aim to desynchr...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to argue in favor of the open hardware philosophy (open-source hardware – OSH) as a technological innovation and academic entrepreneurshipmodel in Brazil. Design/methodology/approach This argument is based on three pillars. The first one refers to a bibliographic review of theoretical frameworks related to acad...

The idea of the epileptic brain being highly excitable and facilitated to synchronic activity has guided pharmacological treatment since the early twentieth century. Although tackling epilepsy's seizure-prone feature, by tonically modifying overall circuit excitability and/or connectivity, the last 50 years of drug development has not seen a substa...

Temporal lobe epileptic seizures are one of the most common and well-characterized types of epilepsies. The current knowledge on the pathology of temporal lobe epilepsy relies strongly on studies of epileptogenesis caused by experimentally induced status epilepticus (SE). Although several temporal lobe structures have been implicated in the epilept...

Epilepsy is a public health issue worldwide, given its biological, social, and economic impacts. Moreover, and particularly important, a significant portion of patients is refractory to conventional treatments and novel treatments are in need. By this token, the use and development of computational tools for the detection of epileptiform spikes, to...

Non-periodic stimulation (NPS) has been shown to be an alternative to the treatment of epilepsy due to its anticonvulsant power. In this work, we analyzed the effects of NPS in the amygdalae of animals submitted to pentylenetetrazole (PTZ), a convulsant drug. We used the power spectrum density (PSD) to compare the energy bands and spectral signatur...

Epilepsy is a brain disorder characterized by sustained predisposition to generate epileptic seizures. According to the World Health Organization, it is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting approximately 50 million people worldwide. A modern approach for brain study is to model it as a complex system composed of a network of osc...

Electrical stimulation of the central nervous system is a promising alternative for the treatment of pharmacoresistant epilepsy. Successful clinical and experimental stimulation is most usually carried out as continuous trains of current or voltage pulses fired at rates of 100 Hz or above, since lower frequencies yield controversial results. On the...

Electrical stimulation (ES)of the nervous system is a promising alternative for the treatment of refractory epilepsy. Based on the understanding that seizures are the expression of neural hypersynchronism, our group developed and tested a non-standard form of low-energy temporally unstructured ES termed NPS (Non-periodic stimulation), with pseudo-r...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Computational Neuroscience, held in São João Del-Rei, Brazil, in September 2019. The 17 full papers and 3 short papers presented have been thoroughly reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: artificial in...

A promising alternative for the treatment of refractory epilepsy is electrical stimulation (ES) of the central nervous system. Based on the premise that epilepsy is a result of neural hypersynchronization, we have previously demonstrated that a novel non-standard form of electrical stimulation with randomized inter-pulse intervals, termed non-perio...

Resumo: Epilepsia é caracterizada por um estado de permanente hiperexcitabilidade do tecido neural. A crise epiléptica, expressão comportamental e neurobiológica desta hiperexcitabilidade, também depende, por outro lado, do acoplamento hipersincrônico de osciladores neurais. No entanto, pouco se sabe acerca dos mecanismos e propriedades desta sincr...

The aim of the study is to analyze the efficacy of two physical training protocols of high intensity on the rats motor performance. Twenty four male Wistar rats were distributed in the following groups: PRT group (n = 8) are the animals who performed physical resistance training protocol; MST group (n = 8) are the animals that performed the muscula...

Many patients with epilepsy do not obtain proper control of their seizures through conventional treatment. We review aspects of the pathophysiology underlying epileptic phenomena, with a special interest in the role of the amygdala, stressing the importance of hypersynchronism in both ictogenesis and epileptogenesis. We then review experimental stu...

A ciência como empreitada humana de busca do conhecimento muito se beneficiou não só do estabelecimento do método científico, mas também de sua divulgação para os pares e para o público leigo. No fazer científico, portanto, entra em cena uma série de atores para além do cientista, incluindo o jornalista e outros mais, estando todos eles sujeitos a...

Sleep is critical for hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation. However, the underlying mechanisms of synaptic plasticity are poorly understood. The central controversy is on whether long-term potentiation (LTP) takes a role during sleep and which would be its specific effect on memory. To address this question, we used immunohistochemistry to me...

Abstract: In the animal model of seizures induced by pentylenetetrazole (PTZ), electrical stimulation (ES) applied with a random inter pulse interval (nonperiodic-NP) to the amygdala has anticonvulsant properties. In addition to the temporal pattern, it is known that the duration, amplitude, intensity, and polarity of pulses are determining factors...

In the PTZ animal model of epilepsy, electrical stimulation applied to the amygdaloid complex may result in either pro-convulsive or anticonvulsant effect, depending on the temporal pattern used (i.e. periodic-PS and non-periodic-NPS electrical stimulation). Our hypothesis is that the anatomical target is a determinant factor for the differential e...

Cortical areas that directly receive sensory inputs from the thalamus were long thought to be exclusively dedicated to a single modality, originating separate labeled lines. In the past decade, however, several independent lines of research have demonstrated cross-modal responses in primary sensory areas. To investigate whether these responses repr...

Our working hypothesis is that constant inter-pulse interval (IPI) electrical stimulation (ES) would resonate with endogenous epileptogenic reverberating circuits, favoring seizure, while random inter-interval ES protocol would promote desynchronization of such neural networks, interfering with the abnormal recruitment of neural structures. Male Wi...

Protocols using both recordings of biopotentials and electrical stimulation of brain tissue have been fundamental in experimental neuroscience, separately or as a set in neurofeedback system. Here we describe an electrical stimulator, which allows for configuration of all parameters through software, including current intensity. Performance of desi...

Electrophysiology is arguably one of the main experimental techniques in neuroscience. Particularly, brain dynamics of epileptiform activity is best assessed in in vivo experiments where the animal is free to express all behaviors, including seizure. A major problem in this approach is the occurrence of movement artifact caused by cable displacemen...

An important step for cholinergic transmission involves the vesicular storage of acetylcholine (ACh), a process mediated by the vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT). In order to understand the physiological roles of the VAChT, we developed a genetically altered strain of mice with reduced expression of this transporter. Heterozygous and homo...