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Ethical procedures

General information

Before you can start your study, you will need to apply for ethical approval - at least in case your study is not covered by one of the existing approved projects.

  • For (f)MRI studies, studies involving patients, studies carried out at UZ Leuven and/or TMS/tDCS studies, you need to file an application at the Ethical committee research UZ/KU Leuven (EC onderzoek). Most of the research done in our lab falls under prospective academic monocentric research, for which you can find the application guidelines here.
  • For behavioral and EEG studies, which do not fall under the Human Experiments Act, you need to file an application at the Social and Societal Ethics Committee (SMEC) via the PRET (PRivacy and EThics) platform.
  • If your research is close to another study that has already been approved within UZ/KU Leuven, you can also cover the necessary ethical requirements by filing for an amendment to the existing approval (which is considerably less time-consuming).

It is important to know that in any case, your study cannot begin until it has been approved. If you are hesitating whether and/or where you should apply for ethical approval for your project, you can consult this decision tree. Examples of previous applications can be found in this folder of the lab's Teams channel.

For more detailed info, please check out the following pages.

Ethics tracker

Once you have identified the ethical application number(s) under which you will test participants (either a new or an existing application), add this information to our ethics tracker (one row per participant subgroup and method). Please keep this overview up to date by regularly updating the number of included participants for each application. This tracker helps us to:

  • keep an overview of all active ethical applications
  • track the number of participants included per application
  • monitor applications that are shared by multiple researchers
  • quickly see when the max. approved number of participants is approaching, so an amendment can be submitted in time

Keeping the tracker updated helps avoid delays in data collection and ensures that we remain compliant with the approved ethics protocols.