CoBra is hosted by experts of the human mind, brain diseases, learning, communication, development, and engineering, promoting its professional implementation and nation-wide use as well as providing a platform for its continuous interdisciplinary development. Due to the personnel with multidisciplinary expertise, its location in the hospital environment, and its world-wide unique know-how in, e.g., infant and brain disease studies, it will attract national and international users on a large scale and facilitate the training of internationally competitive researchers. CoBra includes the following LSRIs:
(directors: Prof. Kujala, Ph.D., and Dr., Doc. Tervaniemi, Ph.D.), now having personnel of more than 40 individuals, has been selected 3 times as the Center of Excellence (Academy of Finland (AF)/University of Helsinki (UH)) and partly belonged to it once. Current infrastructure consists of high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) for adult recordings, child-adjusted EEG for infant recordings, the Navigated Brain Stimulation system (nTMS), autonomic nervous system (ANS), and eye-tracking devices (see: CBRU facilities), systematically utilized also in an integrated manner, e.g., by combined EEG and TMS recordings. The joining of CBRU to the “NEUROIMAGING” infrastructure, belonging to Euro-Bio-Imaging (EuBI) ESFRI project, is in progress.
(director: Dr. Hanna Renvall, MD, Ph.D.), jointly coordinated by Helsinki University Hospital (HUH, the host), UH, and Aalto University (AU), is one of the world’s best-equipped bioelectromagnetism laboratories. It houses two magnetically shielded rooms, a whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG; upgraded in 2015 to Elekta Triux with the prototype of the world’s first zero-level helium boil-off system) & EEG, including a custom-made time-locked video recording system and commercial eye tracking device, nTMS combined with EEG, electromyography (EMG) and video, near-infrared spectroscopic imaging (NIRSI), and a 99-channel flat-bottom SQUID magnetometer. BioMag belongs to the “NEUROIMAGING” research infrastructure of AU, UH, and HUH. “NEUROIMAGING” belongs, as a part of the Finnish consortium participating in the EuBI ESFRI project, to the roadmap of the Finnish Research Infrastructures. The laboratory premises were renewed in 2018 by HUH.
(director: Prof. Vanhatalo, MD, Ph.D.) is the only hospital-based, clinical research laboratory in Europe dedicated to multidisciplinary studies on early brain development in healthy and neurologically sick children. BABA collects together a number of clinical research activities running in Helsinki Children’s Hospital. The infrastructure of BABA includes high-resolution EEG systems custom-built for infant and pediatric studies, two eye-tracking systems built for infant psychophysical and neurocognitive studies, neuropsychological testing setups, video-based infant mobility analysis, intensive care monitoring, and multimodal stimulation systems, as well as a laboratory environment built for studying newborns, infants, and toddlers.