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Ahmet Omurtag

Ahmet Omurtag

Senior Lecturer

School of Science & Technology

Staff Group(s)
Engineering

Role

Dr Omurtag's roles include teaching and research in the Engineering Department.

Career overview

Ahmet holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University and had post-doctoral training in computational neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Ahmet’s research has received funding from National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation in the United States. He was director of research and engineering at Bio-Signal Group, a private company, where he worked on all aspects of biomedical device development. He joined NTU from the University of Houston's Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Research areas

Ahmet is an expert in the biomedical applications of electroencephalography (EEG), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and signal analysis. EEG is a functional brain imaging method that is sensitive to the brain's organized synaptic activity. fNIRS, on the other hand, measures hemoglobin concentration changes in the upper layers of cortex through near-infrared light probes placed on the scalp. Ahmet takes advantage of the strengths of each modality and combines their signals.

His research in recent years has been at the forefront of practical, noninvasive multimodal functional neuroimaging. One of his aims is to create markers for predicting human performance. Such markers can provide objective measures of operators' skill levels, characteristics of the tasks they are engaged in, or the tools which they use.

Ahmet's methods include recording data from human subjects in the laboratory and the clinic, and analyzing them with state-of-the-art feature extraction and machine learning methods. Pooling complementary signals from different types of systems not only enhances the accuracy of the markers. It also allows research into neurovascular coupling, the cascade of processes by which neural activity modulates local blood flow and oxygenation. Ahmet is also exploring the clinical implications of neurovascular coupling, since it is part of the brain's local hemodynamic response to neural activity and is believed to be altered by disease.

External activity

Ahmet frequently puts his industry experience to use by collaborating with and consulting for companies in the area of biomedical devices. He also serves in grant review sections.

Sponsors and collaborators

Funders of Ahmet's work have included the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation. He collaborates with a wide network of scientists, engineers, and clinicians.

Press expertise

Willing to share experiences in neural engineering, signal analysis, medical devices, practical functional neuroimaging.