General information on the ethical procedure

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 and/or patient studies and/or studies carried out at UZ Leuven, 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 or tDCS 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.

TODO: add page on amendments?