Computational Medicine Meetup

Computational Medicine Meetup is a gathering of tech enthusiasts and healthcare professionals eager to explore the the latest developments in computational medicine. Join us on Wednesday, 22nd of May at 6pm for a day filled with insightful talks and networking opportunities.

At upcoming meetup, we will focus on the intersection of computational neuroscience, medicine and disease treatment and diagnostics through AI-powered technologies. Whether you're a data scientist, healthcare professional, or simply curious about the future of healthcare, this event is perfect for you.

Guest Speakers:

Dr Conor Houghton

Conor is an associate professor in computer science and reader in mathematical neuroscience at University of Bristol. He is principally focused on mathematical and computational approaches to neuroscience and, in particular, on models of mood and movement and on computational approaches to neurolinguistics.

Dr Houghton will uncover the topic 'Brainwaves to Breakthroughs: Navigating EEG's Data Analysis in Cognitive and Medical Fields'. Electroencephalography is a convenient approach to measuring neural activity, it is relatively cheap, temporally precise and completely non-invasive. However, the data it produces is very noisy, both because the signal is very weak and because the measurement mixes together lots of different neural activities, from day dreaming to low level activity serving the brain's more mundane tasks. This means that although it is an important diagnostic tool for epilepsy, it is less often used for more cognitive tasks. Conor will discuss how this may be changing as new approaches to data analysis become available.

Dr Joram van Rheede

Joram is a Senior Postdoctoral Neuroengineer in the Bioelectronics Lab at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit, University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the interaction between sleep/wake cycles, circadian rhythms, and neurological conditions using data from patients with brain stimulation devices.

During the meetup, he will discuss 'Effects of deep brain stimulation on sleep in patients with major depressive disorder: why DBS devices need to know about sleep.' Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a therapy proven to be effective for the management of movement disorders and epilepsy, and is under investigation for other conditions including chronic pain, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. DBS therapy settings are generally set during the clinician working day, and then applied 24/7. But how does DBS interact with sleep and circadian rhythms? Using long-term brain activity recordings from implanted DBS devices in patients with major depressive disorder as well as examples from Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, Dr van Rheede will illustrate the need for DBS to take sleep into account, and report on progress made in the Oxford Translational Bioelectronics lab towards a sleep-aware DBS device.