BIONIC: AI, Brain Stimulation, and the Future of Neurotechnology

[00:00:00]Some neurological diseases are defined by cortical hyperexcitability or an abnormally high level of excitability.

[00:00:07][music] Epilepsy is one of those diseases. When people have seizures, that's one example of an event where [music] the excitability of the brain is abnormally high. Broadly speaking, the brain communicates through electricity.

[00:00:23]Neurons, which are the fundamental cells of the brain, quote talk to each other >> [music] >> using electricity. And so, the idea is that we can also use electricity to help [music] better understand the brain and hopefully change the brain and treat brain dysfunction.

[00:00:38]There are invasive ways to change brain dysfunction with electrical stimulation, [music] and there are also non-invasive ways to stimulate the brain. TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, [music] is one foundational non-invasive brain stimulation approach. TDCS, or transcranial direct current stimulation, sometimes called TEEs, or transcranial electrical stimulation, is also another way to influence or neuromodulate the brain non-invasively.

[00:01:10]One of the big challenges with understanding how the brain works and then affecting the brain [music] with stimulation is that we don't have a good way to understand and quantify brain function. A lot of the patients I see, for example with epilepsy, we prescribe medications and we don't have any clear way to know whether those medications will be effective or not. Presently, we more or less treat to failure. What we'd like to do is >> [music] >> change treatment before people fail the treatment. I think we're likely in the next few years to have much better ways to assess brain function, and that's going to lead to dramatic changes in how we treat patients. Our lab [music] is especially focused at quantifying brain function, specifically as it relates to cortical excitability, which we think is a principle that underlies a lot of brain function that relates to many different neurological diseases ranging from epilepsy to pain [music] to disorders of thought and mood to headache and so forth.

[00:02:07]One of the ways we do that is by using something called cortical excitability biomarkers. This is just a way to better understand what's actually going on inside the brain. [music] It usually tries to measure things that we can't readily measure just by asking people questions or looking at structural imaging tests like MRI.

[00:02:28]Rather, we want to assess actual brain function. And so, we need a neurophysiology test [music] like EEG or MEG to assess how brain [music] activity is working on a second-by-second basis.

[00:02:41]This kind of work understanding brain physiology in many ways is enormously complicated. So, it involves people from a wide [music] variety of specialties and requires interdisciplinary close cooperative work, [music] which is something that is here easily done. The Bionic Initiative is really a way to understand and organize all the different expertise that exists at Mayo Clinic and help move that forward in a cooperative and integrative fashion. As we look [music] at the different ways of understanding the brain, I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially with some of the new technological developments around AI and how we can [music] integrate multimodal streams of data and incorporate that into approaches related to bioelectronic medicine. I think there's almost unbounded [music] potential to what we can do.