[BIC-announce] FW: RE : talk at UdM about brain states in cognition, Wednesday, March 20, 2013

[Jennifer Chew, Ms.]

For your information.  

SEMINAR 

Date:  Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Time:  12:00 Noon
Place:  Amphitheatre Le Groupe Maurice
CRIUGM (Centre de recherché Institut universitaire de geriatrie de Mtl)
4565 Queen Mary Road

SPEAKER:  Prof. Istvan Akos Morocz, Harvard Medical School, Boston
TITLE OF SEMINAR:  Monitoring Cognitive Integrity


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Monitoring Cognitive Integrity

The clinical implication of a brain mapping technique that quantitatively captures complex cognitive processes in humans could be immense.  However, there are, as of today, no robust tools that suit this purpose.  Simple paper/pencil tests still often have more predictive power than conventional brain mapping regarding therapeutic decisions upon follow-up studies.  The problem is conceptual as both data acquisition and analysis are inaptly designed for the complex nature of neural processes.  The traditional uni-dimensional analysis approach is robust in the statistical sense but the resulting simplistic activity maps relate too vaguely to the true temporo-spatial nature of aberrant functional trajectories that pathological thought processes consist of.  Recent publications imply that pattern-recognizing brain-states analyses compute meaningful functional models that may suit especially the longitudinal comparison of data.  New results in computing holistic state space models (SSM) in subjects afflicted with a developmental learning disability like dyslexia or dyscalculia or with schizophrenia are truly promising.