Our Research & Tools
Here you can read more about our main neurolinguistic research streams & language tools.
Awake brain surgery
Awake brain surgery is the gold standard treatment for brain tumors in areas important for speech in order to maximize survival and maintain quality of life. During surgery, the neurosurgeon safely removes the tumor while the linguist monitors patient’s speech/language functions (read more here). Erasmus MC was the first Dutch hospital to perform awake brain surgeries and has more than 20 years experience in awake brain surgery and language monitoring. As a multidisciplinary team, the departments of neurosurgery, clinical linguistics, neuroscience and neurology all work together to perform brain and language research with the goal to improve the outcome of brain tumor patients.
Development of language tests and tools
Over the years various language tests and tools have been developed in the context of awake brain surgery and aphasia .
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DuLIP: Dutch Linguistic Intraoperative Protocol including tasks for intraoperative use, adapted in 8 other languages, more to come (Japanese, ...)
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DuLIP kids: adaptiation of DuLIP tasks for kids (available in Dutch, Norwegian)
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DuLIP extended: additional tasks for patients with mild/moderate/severe aphasia
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DIMA: Diagnostic Instrument for Mild Aphasia, DIGITAL VERSION LAUNCHING SOON
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Questionnaire mild aphasia (subjective complaints)
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PRODUCT PAGE WITH MORE DETAILS COMING SOON, CONTACT US FOR MORE INFO
Spontaneous speech and artifical intelligence (AI)
The team has already demonstrated the relevance of spontaneous speech analyses in the context of outcome in brain tumor patients. Unfortunately, spontaneous speech analysis is very time-consuming in clinical practice. Artificial intelligence (AI) models have been built to automatically transcribe and analyze spontaneous speech in other patients groups. However, in brain tumor patients this has never been done before, due to the challenging circumstances of the operating room and more mild and more subtle speech/language problems typically for brain tumor patients. With this research we want to investigate the use of AI in automatic speech recognition and analysis in brain tumor patients in collaboration with AI experts from TU Delft. In addition, we are collaborating with other departments of Erasmus MC (neuropsychology, psychiatry, oromaxillofacial surgery) to enlarge our cohort to other patient populations such as patients with dementia, psychosis, shisis ...). We are building a digital platform inluding AI algorythms that will provide the clinician an objective and affordable language assessment which optimizes diagnoses and outcome of patients.
Thanks to our funders
