Giulio Gabrieli
giuliog.bsky.social
Giulio Gabrieli
@giuliog.bsky.social
Researcher by Day, Nerd by Night.

PostDoc at Digital Futures Research Hub, Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin)

Turns coffee into Open Science & Open Source.
🌐 Why it matters:
ESI opens the door to precise, real-time monitoring of the spinal cord🔍🧩, with the potential to advance both basic neuroscience 🧠 and clinical neurophysiology 🏥offering diagnostic tools for conditions like spinal dysfunction and spinal cord injury.

🧵9/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
And here’s the real wow moment 🤯⚡: attention actually changes spinal activity, revealing that our cognitive state can influence sensory processing all the way down in the spinal cord, not just in the brain.

🧵8/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
These signals correspond to different steps in the sensory processing chain:
-on the side of the stimulation, sP9 reflects a traveling volley of incoming sensory input⚡➡️
- central and symmetrical in the spine, sN13 and sP22 capture local postsynaptic processing 🔄

🧵7/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
We detected 3 electrical responses in the spinal cord: sP9, sN13, and sP22 ⚡ (numbers reflect their timing in milliseconds after the stimulus). Each response represents a different stage of how sensory information is processed as it travels into the spinal cord.

🧵6/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
To activate the sensory system, we delivered gentle, controlled electrical pulses to the wrist 🔌✋. By recording signals from the peripheral nerves, spinal cord, and brain, we built high-resolution maps 🗺️⏱️ of how sensory information travels through the body.

🧵5/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
We then applied a rigorous, data-driven cleaning pipeline 🧼📊 to remove noise from muscles, movement, and other sources.
This allowed us to isolate the true spinal responses ⚡ with much higher clarity and spatial detail than previous noninvasive methods.

🧵4/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
We developed a new technique called Electrical Spinal Imaging (ESI). It uses a dense array of surface electrodes placed on the back to record tiny electrical signals from the spinal cord, while also capturing EEG (brain)🧠 and ECG (heart) ❤️‍🩹.

🧵3/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
🚨Our latest paper, Electrical Spinal Imaging: A noninvasive, high‑resolution approach that enables electrophysiological mapping of the human spinal cord is out now in PLOS Biology doi.org/10.1371/jour...

It's not only fancy figures, let me show you ⬇️

🧵1/10
December 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM