QLS Guest Seminar - Thursday, 31 October

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

QLS Guest Seminar - Thursday, 31 October 14h00am

ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, SISSA Building, via Beirut 2

Speaker:     Wael El-Deredy - Universidad de Valparaiso, Centro de Investigacion y
Desarrollo en Ingenieria en Salud, Brain Dynamics Lab, Valparaiso, Chile

Title: Dynamic Brain-state allocation in health and neurodegeneration

Abstract:
At the moment, when a patient presents with clinical symptoms of
Parkinson’s or Alzheimer's disease there is very little the clinical
community can do other than  manage the symptoms of what are inevitable
degenerative conditions.  Alterations in the neural state (or states)
that eventually will produce functional and behavioural consequences had
  been set in motion perhaps 20 years earlier, and provoked the search
for proper biomarkers in asymptomatic individuals. The reorganisation of
  functional brain networks, either due to slow changes in the relative
contribution/wiring of brain areas (plasticity) or due to fast
modulation of their causal interactions (effective connectivity), mask
the early stages of neurodegeneration, until alterations cannot be
compensated.  Until recently, approaches to brain function in health and
  disease mostly did not take into account the fact that the brain is
highly dynamic, and that studying brain function as a series of static
states may not be the most effective way to encounter early biomarkers
for neurodegeneration. Rather, the clues might lay in the path or
trajectory by which functional brain networks evolve and transition over
  time or their dwell time irregularities. Methodologically, estimating
the evolution of the non-stationary and non-linear brain is challenging.
  Most solutions apply a fixed predetermined moving window, over which
functional connectivity is estimated, thus missing the explicit
modelling of the dynamical regimes, across multiple temporal
length-scales, over which the brain networks are assumed to switch, from
  few multi-seconds to seconds. The assumption here is that early stages
of neurodegeneration could be detected and differentiated from normal
ageing as alterations in the dynamical repertoires that the brain
networks explore, either at rest or during task performance. These
alterations would be reflected either in terms of the probability of the
  brain switching between network configurations, the duration it spends
in particular configurations, or in terms of the sequence or path of
configurations.

	In this talk I will discuss advantages and disadvantages of current
tools and present a conceptual framework for modelling brain dynamics
that bridges between bottom-up data driven models and top-down
biophysical models.

Indico: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9198/

  Everyone interested is most welcome to attend!

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail: qls at ictp.it