Abstracts

Summary: The direct measurement of electrical activity from the cortex and subcortical structures has helped define the concept of a seizure focus, helps locate the seizure onset area for epilepsy surgery, and is necessary for closed-loop brain implantable devices. Advances including active sensors, new materials such as thin films, silicon micromachined electrodes, wireless telemetry, solid state and remote power solutions and new fabrication technologies are creating new avenues for multimodal sensing of the brain. These advances may have considerable impact on work in epilepsy and the field of brain-computer interface. There is a need to understand the technological challenges that must be solved in both these fields. There is a need as well to improve our understanding of normal and abnormal brain activity. Speakers in this investigator workshop will address new methodologies to measure electrical and neurochemical activity and the separate and joint analysis of these sensor signals. The speakers and the titles of their presentations are: Daryl Kipke, PhD (Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan), “Advanced neural interface technologies with applications to neural monitoring and stimulation”; Bruce Lanning, PhD (Director, Thin Film Technologies, ITN Energy Systems) “Implantable multimodal brain sensors”; and Miguel Nicolelis, MD, PhD (Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Duke University), “Computing with neural ensembles”. The discussant is Tore Eid, MD, PhD (Associate Research Scientist, Laboratory Medicine, Yale University). A panel discussion will follow the individual presentations.