The paragraphs below described the active internal projects of our company.  Those projects related to client consulting and private product design are not disclosed on the website. For more information on the consulting service we can provide, see our Consulting Page or our Expertise Page. For information on products, see our Product Page.

Very Early Detection of Age-Related Brain Disease to reduce disease impact:

Value: to find disease early and then use therapies to slow (or cure) the progression of the disease.

Currently, there is an emphasis on investigating body material biomarkers for the prediction/detection of AD and PD.  Our approach is a bit different: we’re looking at behavior and brain function so that we can detect progressive negative changes in brain function and behavior and use classifiers to identify different types of negative trends.

We are currently improving on existing methods and developing new algorithms for mining data and making comparisons among datasets.  Our objective is to not only investigate brain function to detect a individual’s ‘operating point’ and predict where their health is headed but to take things a step further and link active task-related brain function to behavior for the purpose of detecting when behavioral compensation is used to compensate for brain dysfunction.  Investigating brain function and behavioral strategy together provides the ability to detect behavioral compensation for brain function decline.

Detailed Measurement of Changes in Brain Function during stoke recovery to guide rehabilitation:

Value: to maximize the rate the recovery of lost function after sustaining a stroke.

This project proposes to use new EEG methods (MOST-EEG) to measure changes in the activation and coordination of distinct areas of the brain for the purpose of showing how the activities of these distinct areas change during stroke recovery. We expect that the ability to measure such changes during stroke recovery can be used to: (1) guide the types of therapies selected for stroke recovery and (2) improve compliance to therapies by showing and quantifying very subtle changes during the recovery period. More generally, measuring changes in brain function during stroke recovery will improve our understanding of how behavioral function is recovered post-stroke in humans.

We are currently seeking partners to demonstrate the use of this technology.

Reducing Costs of CNS Pharmaceutical Development and Obtaining Useful Information Early to support the development of treatments and cures for age-related brain disease and injury

Value: (1) reduce ‘between participant’ variance in drug studies, and (2) provide researchers with knowledge about what systems of the brain are affected by the drug under investigation (In Phase I and Phase II), and how the interactivity of these brain systems change.

The key contribution is to ability to get a good view of brain ‘function’– on drug, off drug, with various dosages, and with respect to specific human behavior — and do this early in the drug development process.  To reduce the costs associated with CNS drug development, it is important to determine if the drug is effective and to do this as early as possible.  The methodologies and tools we offer are simply to answer the questions:

1. do the persons participating in the study all use their brains the same way?
2. for those persons who use their brains the same way, does the drug have a positive impact by enhancing activities in target brain areas?

We are currently refining how we will approach an investigation of a drug design to treat PD / AD. Persons interested in a research collaboration should contact Dr. Zeman (pzeman@abvsciences.com).

EEG Data Cleaning Software

Value: to reduce costs associated with processing biometric data by reducing the time required by technicians/specialists to inspect the data or manually select clean ‘epochs’ of data. At the same time, the goal is to improve the quality of the brain activity representation contained in the EEG.

We created this system to provide sophisticated cleaning algorithms to the many, many investigators and practitioners ’locked-in’ to using the algorithms that came with their software.  Our objective is to offer the best possible algorithms available by providing them in the form of an on-line service that we can update any time a new algorithm is created.  The algorithms and the software in the the Alpha testing stage of development.  Currently, there are approximately 18 persons who are actively helping to test the system and offer design improvements through this Alpha stage of development. To become an alpha-tester, download the client software and complete the online form to receive a free user account on our system. The Beta testing stage is not far away.

EEG Data Mining Software

Value: to provide investigators and practitioners the ability to mine their EEG data to discover what brain function belies the common EEG waveforms.    The aim is to provide a data-driven representation of brain function in the form of schematic and system diagrams in 2D (circuit diagram) and 3D (brain anatomy) representation.

The algorithms that were developed by Dr. Zeman during his graduate work at the University of Victoria that provides the value described above will be put online as soon as the software connecting the algorithms to the server/client interface are complete.

Acqusition and Analysis of Eye-Movement and Brain Activity (EEG Data) Associated With Spatial Navigation in Video Games

Value: to improve our understanding of spatial navigation cognition, the diseases and brain injuries that impact it, while at the same time refining our methods and algorithms for working with this type of data and these types of paradigms.  The technology and methods developed in this project will provide us with the basis to do early detection of brain-related disease and disease classification and to develop cognitive assessment tools.

This project is a continuation of a collaboration between the University of Victoria (Ron Skelton and Sharon Lee), Vancouver Island University (Tony Robertson) and Applied Brain and Vision Sciences (Philip Michael Zeman).

Applied Brain and Vision Sciences was founded to change the way we understand brain function and treat brain diseases. Simply, we believe there is a ‘better’ way to diagnose and treat brain disease and dysfunction. We believe that through appropriate therapies and objective measures of functional brain activity and other bio-signals during the course of these therapies, we can make health-related and technological advances to significantly impact lives. Application of our ‘sciences’ in multiple contexts provides us with opportunities to improve our understanding of brain function and develop new technology to measure it.