LaBGAS — Laboratory for Brain-Gut Axis Studies

LaBGAS is a strongly interdisciplinary human research group at KU Leuven, embedded in the Translational Research Center for Gastrointestinal Disorders (TARGID) and a member of the Leuven Brain Institute. We study how signals travelling between the gut and the brain shape what people feel — bodily symptoms, appetite, mood and fear — combining functional brain imaging, PET, psychophysiology and controlled nutritional and microbial interventions in humans.

We also build the analysis software behind that work, and release it openly.

Research lines

Gastrointestinal symptom, pain, and fatigue perception

Psychobiological mechanisms underlying symptom perception in disorders of gut-brain interaction, studied with functional brain imaging and psychophysiology.

Appetite, food intake & reward

How gastrointestinal signals act on the homeostatic and hedonic brain circuits regulating appetite, feeding and body weight — including dopamine, opioid and endocannabinoid systems studied with PET-MR.

Microbiota, gut signals & the mind

How nutrient- and microbiota-derived gut signals influence stress, fear learning, affect and cognition — the focus of our ERC-funded MoodBugs project.

See all research lines and projects

Open code and documentation

Our neuroimaging analyses run on an openly developed MATLAB codebase built on top of the CANlab toolset. Two repositories carry the reusable parts:

  • LaBGAScore — core scripts and templates for our standard workflow: BIDS conversion, first-level modelling, second-level and multivariate pipelines, PET, MR spectroscopy and atlas tooling.
  • CANlab_help_examples — our fork of the CANlab help repository, carrying the batch pipeline we use for second-level analysis and date-stamped HTML reporting.

Built on CANlab tools. LaBGAScore is not a standalone toolbox. It depends on CanlabCore and Neuroimaging_Pattern_Masks from the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, plus SPM12. Start with the CANlab setup guide before our pipeline documentation.

Tools overview Pipeline documentation

Latest news

All news

Take part

We regularly recruit healthy volunteers and patients for our studies, and we host master’s students, PhD candidates and post-docs. See Join us, or write to Liene Bervoets about taking part in a study and to Lukas Van Oudenhove about research positions.

Our work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), KU Leuven internal funds (BOF, including Methusalem), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.