EEG research has produced many candidate biomarkers, yet most remain disconnected from clinical care. Arthur-Ervin Avramiea, Marina Diachenko, Hilgo Bruining, and Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen received an NWO Open Technology Program grant to build an open-source platform accelerating the transition from modeling research to personalized treatment.
Imagine an Amsterdam where a biomarker discovered in one lab on Monday is running on another lab’s cohorts by Friday, and feeding into a clinical report the week after. Where a PhD student leaves behind not a folder of scripts, but a method other groups are already using. Where the data are organized, accessible, and interoperable, adding value to future studies instead of being lost on local drives. Where the question “how does this analytical idea perform on the ENIGMA data?” gets answered in an afternoon, not a year. Where Amsterdam is the place international consortia turn to when they want EEG analyses done rigorously and at scale. This is what a cumulative EEG ecosystem makes possible: research that compounds instead of restarts, and a direct line from discovery to
patient.
A shared EEG ecosystem for Amsterdam and beyond. Reusable EEG data, workflows, biomarkers, models, and reports across groups. A prototype is already active at the N=You Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at Amsterdam UMC, and the cloud version has supported large-scale student training and EEG cleaning.
Toward a shared EEG ecosystem
EEG is recorded across Amsterdam in growing volumes, and the international community has made vast open datasets available. Yet most analysis still happens in isolated scripts and incompatible formats. The field has no shortage of promising biomarkers. What is missing is a way of turning them into something cumulative. We want to give Amsterdam Neuroscience the infrastructure to do that.
Over the past decade, we have been building the Neurophysiological Biomarker Cloud, an EEG platform where data, analyses, biomarkers, and clinical reports live in one shared, version-controlled environment. When a feature is added, every other user can apply it to their own data with minimal effort. A biomarker that proves itself in research is immediately available for clinical use. A prototype is already running at Amsterdam UMC, supporting the N=You Neurodevelopmental Precision Center. In the past two years, internship students at the VU have used the cloud version to clean thousands of EEG recordings and produce more than 100 internship reports.
Scaling research, reuse, and collaboration
A shared platform multiplies the value of existing work. A dataset cleaned for one project can support another. A pipeline one group develops can be tested by others. A biomarker can move from model validation to cohort-scale testing, to clinical reporting without being rewritten each time. Students trained in one setting can contribute across projects because they share tools, standards, and expectations. This matters especially for questions that are too large for one lab alone: cross-disorder biomarker comparisons, harmonized analyses across cohorts, treatment-response prediction, large-scale normative modeling, international consortium analyses, and reproducible clinical EEG research.
The aim is to create the conditions for EEG research in Amsterdam to become more connected, scalable, and cumulative.
Training and scalable education
The platform was built to be usable by people who are not software engineers, and it already serves as the backbone of a structured internship pipeline at the VU producing more than 100 internship reports. This includes an EEG “driver’s” license: a hands-on training and certification module that teaches students practical EEG cleaning and quality control before they work on their own datasets. Embedding this within Amsterdam Neuroscience would give participating groups access to a trained, growing pool of students ready to work on real data. It would also give students a clearer path into EEG research, through shared training, reusable teaching datasets, joint supervision, and projects that can contribute across Amsterdam.
Open Technology Programme
The Open Technology Programme provides funding for application-oriented technical-scientific research that is free and unrestricted and is not hindered by disciplinary boundaries. Within this allocation, NWO stimulates the development of new technologies that offer solutions to diverse societal and scientific issues. The awarded projects combine scientific excellence with tangible impact.