Matteo Vissani, PhD

Biomedical Engineer | PhD in Biorobotics

Passionately Curious

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About me

I am currently a Research fellow in neurosurgery at the Brain Modulation Lab, MGH-Harvard, US.

Matteo Vissani received a PhD in Biorobotics at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. He received a BSc in Biomedical Engineering at Marche Polytechnic University and a MSc in Biomedical Engineering at University of Bologna. He partecipated in the Erasmus + Programme at Campus Biotech and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He pursued a Research Fellowship at Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois.

Matteo's research interest lies in the intersection between neuroengineering, computational modeling and clinical questions. He focuses on tackling two current scientific Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) challenges. The first one hovers around the localization of neural targets that mediate optimal clinical outcomes for patients without emerging noxious DBS-induced side-effects – the so-called sweet spots. The second one deals with the computation of patient-state related biomarkers that could be potentially used to inform the pattern of the stimulation.

In his PhD work, Matteo focused on developing quantitative tools to elucidate how different basal ganglia nuclei are functionally organized and to characterize the relationship between the neural activity with either the stimulation in situ or the state (e.g., clinical severity, motor behaviour) of the patient. These methods have been applied to a variegate repertoire of neural signals acquired either with explorative microelectrodes (intraoperatively) or DBS electrodes (postoperatively) from different DBS target nuclei in the basal ganglia (e.g., Subthalamic Nucleus and Globus Pallidus internus) in multiple cohorts of patients (e.g., Parkinson's Disease and Tourette Syndrome).

When not working at these tasks, Matteo loves cooking, staring stars, reading and hiking.

Publications (in progress)

Journal Articles

  1. Vissani M.*, Palmisano C.*, Volkmann J., Pezzoli G., Micera S., Mazzoni A. and Isaias I. U. Impaired reach-to-grasp kinematics in parkinsonian patients relates to dopamine-dependent, subthalamic beta bursts. npj Parkinsons Dis. 7, 53 2021 doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41531-021-00187-6.

  2. Manferlotti E.,Vissani M., Mazzoni A., Kumar A. Correlated inputs to striatal population drive subthalamic nucleus hyper-synchronization. 10th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER 2021)

  3. Micheli F.*, Vissani M.* , Pecchioli G., Terenzi F., Ramat S., Mazzoni A. Impulsivity Markers in Parkinsonian Subthalamic Single-Unit Activity. Mov Disord. 2021 Jan 16. doi: 10.1002/mds.28497. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33453079.

  4. Vissani M., Isaias I. U., Mazzoni A. Deep brain stimulation: a review of the open neural engineering challenges. J Neural Eng. 2020 Oct 14;17(5):051002. doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/abb581 . PMID: 33052884.

  5. Vissani M., Cordella R., Micera S., Eleopra R., Romito L. M., Mazzoni A. Spatio-temporal structure of single neuron subthalamic activity identifies DBS target for anesthetized Tourette syndrome patients. J Neural Eng. 2019 Oct 23;16(6):066011. doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/ab37b4 . PMID: 31370042.

  6. Palmisano C., Brandt G., Vissani M., Pozzi N. G., ..., and Isaias I. U. Gait Initiation in Parkinson's Disease: Impact of Dopamine Depletion and Initial Stance Condition.Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2020 Mar 6;8:137. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2020.00137. PMID: 32211390; PMCID: PMC7068722.

  7. Franza M., Sorrentino G., Vissani M., Serino .A, Blanke O. and Bassolino M.Hand perceptions induced by single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation over the primary motor cortex.Brain Stimul. 2019 May-Jun;12(3):693-701.doi: 10.1016/j.brs.2018.12.972.Epub 2018 Dec 23. PMID: 30611706.


News

  1. Nov 10-11 2022: NEW TALK!!! I will present my new project about cortico-subcortical interaction in speech production at HSN Conference in Los Angeles, CA.

  2. May 22 2022: NEW POSITION!!! I got a Research Fellow position in the Brain Modulation Lab in Boston, MA.