What is The Brainmarker Assessment Suite?

The Brainclinics Brainmarker Assessment Suite is a turnkey EEG assessment protocol comprising of an EEG test battery, a comprehensive, validated questionnaire touching the topics Sleep, Focus, Feeling and Lifestyle and a Psychomotor Vigilance Task to measure your client’s sleep debt. Our one-of-a-kind Resonant Breathing exercise offers a rare insight in the correlation between Heart and Brain, while our algorithm returns the optimal breathing frequency for the client. The algorithm also identifies four brainmarkers, providing you with possible treatment course indicators.
After processing you can view the results in a reporting dashboard, divided in three sections: Self-Report, Brainmarkers and Heart-Brain.

Easy set up, fast and accurate results

Our EEG Assessment, as well as the questionnaire, runs on iPads, and we designed the whole system so it’s easy to set up, easy to operate and easy to update.
You just upload the EEG and the questionnaire’s answers to our secure servers, where our software, written in-house by our researchers, will process the results, providing you with a report in minutes.
Our unique solution offers accurate, scientifically proven results and is based on two decades of meticulous research, often on or beyond the frontiers of knowledge.

Brainmarkers

While analyzing EEG’s we discovered that a patients’ EEG will show unique signatures that can serve as indicators for specific treatment methods. There’s an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting this theory, see for a review, including many of our studies our Stratified Psychiatry section.

Some background
Frontal Alpha Symmetry (FAA) can be used as a treatment optimization prognostic biomarker in Major Depressive Disorder (see this article in Neuroimage: Clinical), and sertraline could be the recommended course of treatment for patients with abnormal EEG patterns, as published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
See this recent article in Biological Psychiatry CNNI investigating Brainmarker-I in relation to ADHD.
Our software can identify no less than four brainmarkers.

Powered by Brainclinics

The Brainclinics Foundation has over twenty years of experience in EEG research, and our researchers published numerous articles in high impact journals on this and other topics like Sleep, ADHD, Depression, OCD and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Our work is motivated by the understanding that mental disorders can be cured and quality of life can be improved. Our motto is “from the clinic, to the clinic”, symbolizing our practical perspective on mental disorders and their remedies.

Stratified Psychiatry

In recent years we grew dissatisfied with the one-size-fits-all approach in psychiatry. Although great results can be achieved by current methods, we often find that patients go through treatment without really benefiting, and they experience unnecessary delay in their cure.
The ideal path forward is, of course, personalized medicine, but at present this is expensive and unfeasible for most patients.
In the meantime, stratified psychiatry is a great alternative, and unlike personal medicine, it is within reach for many patients and clinicians.

And thanks to our research, it’s available now.

Our very own Dr. Martijn Arns hosted a very interesting webinar, on the topic of stratified psychiatry and the use of our EEG based Brainmarker-i.

Please take a look at the interactive demo of our breakthrough solution, showing the report with detailed explanations of the results of an assessment of an anonymous client.

The complete assessment

Our Brainmarker assessment suite consists of four tasks: Eyes open, Eyes closed, Oddball and Resonant Breathing. The test runs on our own hardware (the Brainhub) and is presented to the client via an iPad, with clear auditory and on-screen instructions. The EEG signals are processed using Curry software and are uploaded to our secure server for analysis.
In addition to the EEG recording your client answers over a 100 validated questions that are also presented on an iPad. Understanding that assessments generally cause some stress to clients, and can take up a lot of their time, we designed the process to run as smoothly and quick as possible, without cutting corners or skipping on accuracy and validity.
Both the EEG and the questionnaire are available in English and Dutch, with more languages on the way.
The Psychomotor Vigilance Task completes the assessment.

Viewing and interpreting the results

Uploading the answers to the questionnaire is done by simply pressing a button on the iPad, and uploading the raw EEG is equally easy.
All data is processed in a dedicated pipeline, and you can expect validated and accurate results in less than 15 minutes.* By designing the system from the ground up we managed to shave off hours, (or even days) of the time it usually takes to process psychological assessments.

The results dashboard is designed for ease of use and enables fast interpretation. This way of presenting complex data in a clear manner is common in business and professional healthcare, but relatively new in the field of psychology. We managed to design a dashboard that looks deceptively simple but is in fact very information dense.
On the first of its three pages no less than 17 metrics are presented, on the subject of Focus, Feeling and Sleep. Your client’s results are shown in comparison with normalized cut offs, so interpreting your client’s score is easy and precise, leaving less room for errors.
The second page of the dashboard presents you with the results of the EEG, showing the four brainmarkers we discovered, and of course these scores are equally easy to interpret and understand.
The third page, showing the heart rate and heart rate variability of your client during the EEG tasks and breathing exercise gives you a clear insight in the ideal resonant breathing frequency for your client.

We’ve written an extensive manual, including a quick start section. We firmly believe in user friendliness, so you can concentrate on matters that are really important: your clients, and their well being.

Discussing the dashboard with your client
The information dashboard enables you to discuss the scores with your client, thereby providing you with an effective therapeutic tool.

*When our servers are busy, the assessments are queued, so sometimes it may take longer. We offer dedicated processing to our clients, if speed is essential. Please contact us for a quote.

Further reading

Here’s an interesting read on the history of the EEG and QEEG. Our website also features a page dedicated to Stratified Psychiatry, and of course we recommend our Publications page.

Schedule a demo

Would you like to know more? Try out the interactive demo!
We are happy to answer your questions or schedule an in depth look at our turnkey assessment suite. Contact us!