Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest for interventional technologies aimed at perturbing brain activity in order to achieve a therapeutic effect. These technologies include invasive intracranial or deep brain stimulation as well as non invasive transcranial magnetic or current stimulation. They have shown promising results in a number of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain and epilepsy, among others. In this presentation, I will review some of these results and show that a number of neuroengineering challenges are to be addressed regarding i) the impact of  electric fields on neuronal networks, ii) their acute and long lasting effects depending on the stimulation protocols and iii) the technological aspects to achieve better selectivity and specificity.  Ultimately, we can expect that the mechanisms of therapeutic action achieved by neuromodulation technologies will be optimized, in the specific context of considered brain disorders.


Biography:
Fabrice Wendling (PhD) holds a position of Director of Research at INSERM. He is heading the team SESAME: “Epileptogenic Systems: Signals and Models”, LTSI - INSERM U1099, Rennes, France since 2004. He got the Engineering Diploma (1989) from the University of Technology of Compiègne (France) and the Master of Science (1991) in Bio-Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA). He obtained the PhD degree (1996) and the Habilitation (2003) from the University of Rennes (France). He has been working in epilepsy research for more than 20 years in close collaboration with clinicians. His work is devoted to the analysis of brain signals and to the (patho)physiological modeling of neuronal systems. He has served as an associate editor for IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. (2011-13) and for Brain Topography (2007-). In 2012, he received the award (Prix Michel Montpetit - INRIA) from the French Academy of Science. He authored/co-authored about 110 peer-reviewed articles.