The overall objective of this effort is to convene ?ISPW8: Designing the next generation of closed loop seizure control?, that will take place August 20-23, 2017 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This conference is the next in a series of seizure prediction workshops that started in 2002, and has become the premier international venue for quantitative epilepsy research. The goal of this upcoming meeting is to focus on the development of all stages of a next-generation seizure control device. The first day will have two didactic sessions, one focusing on the clinical aspects of epilepsy, the other on Big Data analytic techniques. The body of the conference will be organized around themes motivated by the three stages of closed loop intervention: 1) input: sensing and biomarkers, 2) processing: system analysis, 3) output: intervention. The theme of the second day of will be on multimodal sensors and biomarkers of epilepsy, focused especially on developing new technology. The theme of the third day will be on utilizing advanced machine learning, statistics, and computational models, to understand and characterize the large datasets from high resolution technology. The final day will be on novel interventions and control theory: new strategies for implantable anti-seizure interventions and methods for optimizing them, as well as implementation into closed loop control devices. ?Provocative sessions? at the end of each day will focus on unpublished research and hypotheses followed by discussion and debate. Through this conference we aim to build bridges between the many disciplines that comprise this unique field: theoretical, computational, experimental, clinical, and industry, while also preparing the next wave of young researchers. The overall goal is to develop improved quantitative methods to predict, quantify, characterize, and control seizures. NIH funding is sought for travel support to encourage US participation.
Project Relevance/Project Narrative We plan to convene an international meeting to address questions at the intersection of clinical neurophysiology, engineering, computational and epilepsy neuroscience using emerging technologies and quantitative methods. The objectives of this interdisciplinary group ? and the themes of the meeting ? are to take our growing understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics that lead to seizures at all scales of brain from neuron to organism, and develop successful technologies and therapies for observing, predicting and treating pharmacoresistant epilepsy syndromes.
