Behzad Iravani

I am a dedicated research scientist affiliated with the Laboratory for Large-Scale Network Connectivity in the Human Brain at the Karolinska Institutet. My passion lies in the exploration of medical devices, utilizing various clinical experiments and analytical tools to make a positive impact on healthcare.

Ph.D. in Medicine - Clinical Neuroscience 

I have developed a non-invasive method, the so-called electrobulbogram (EBG), to record from a human olfactory bulb (OB). In this method, we placed 4 active electrodes on the forehead of individuals following the outline of their eyebrows. Assessing the spectrogram reveals that EBG can detect the characteristics of gamma oscillations of OB. We have further validated this method in several experiments. Non-invasive recording from the human olfactory bulb [1].

Our EBG method has shown promising results where we could demonstrate that odor valence processing during the first sniff in humans is a sequential process consisting of early and late processes. The oscillatory behavior of these processes is different, and so does their functional role. Specifically, we indicated that the early process cues avoidance motor response in humans. The human olfactory bulb processes odor valence representation and cues motor avoidance behavior [2].

Moreover, using EBG we further demonstrated that the odor identity can be deciphered from the connectivity between OB and piriform cortex (PC) as early as 100ms post odor onset. We also found that the oscillation in the OB-PC connectivity evolves from fast gamma oscillations to slower theta oscillations during late time points. Additionally, the afferent and efferent connections of OB-PC are found to operate in gamma/beta and delta/theta respectively. Odor identity can be extracted from the reciprocal connectivity between the olfactory bulb and the piriform cortex in humans [3].
Given that OB is the first area of insult in Parkinson's disease (PD),