Norberto Garcia-Cairasco
Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto – Universidade de São Paulo – Brasil.
Physiology/Neuroscience & Behavioral Sciences Departments. Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine.
LECTURE: Complexity Systems and Emergent Properties Views as Applied to Epilepsy Research: A Paradigm Shift Eagerly Needed.
The study of the epilepsies and associated neuropsychiatric comorbidities has evolved over decades into big challenges for complexity system solutions and the consequent emergent properties. Looking first at the semiology descriptions, we have passed from qualitative descriptions to sophisticated digital capturing and graph analysis of behavioral sequences.
The complementary EEG parameters needed for epileptogenic zones and lesions detection, have grown in sophistication, from surface EEG to stereo-EEG, allowing the construction of complex electrophysiologically-connected networks, although not necessarily used in its entire magnitude for prognosis modeling, for example, of recurrence. Finally, the evolution of high resolution imaging tools such as MRI, Bold, DTI, have allowed the production of sophisticated connectivity maps (connectomes).
Norberto Garcia-Cairasco will show how little effort, indeed, has been done over the decades to place all these datasets together as a means to reconstruct the ideal, certainly utopic, model of combined electrophysiological, imaging and its final common manifestation, semiology, in a single but complex map.
The availability of computational neuroscience tools has increased the analytical power for both diagnosis (etiology and causality), and solutions (a wide variety of selective or network-wise targets for prediction and therapeutic protocols). Looking at the future, he will finally discuss how this totally new trans-disciplinary approach, will help to make the eagerly needed “paradigm shift” in this important field of research.