Ana Marta Dias, INESC TEC researcher, won the award for “Best Poster” of the Portuguese chapter of the International Neuromodulation Society (INS), within the scope of the first Iberian Meeting on Neuromodulation – out of a total of 17 posters. The work – part of the master’s thesis in Bioengineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) – aims to present the mechanisms underlying the deep brain stimulation of the anterior nucleus of the thalamus (ANT-DBS) in epilepsy (a safe and effective therapy), and to understand whether these vary in different types of epilepsy.
Assessing functional thalamocortical connectivity in adults with frontal and temporal lobe epilepsy is the title of the winning poster, which represented the research carried out at INESC TEC Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research (C-BER) – in cooperation with the Epilepsy and Sleep Centre of the Großhadern University Hospital in Munich (Bavaria, Germany).
“We seek to individualise therapies so that treatments are more efficient for each patient”, stated the researcher, who dedicated her work to analysing functional connectivity between the cerebral cortex and the ANT, towards understanding if there is any differentiating pattern between two types of focal epilepsy: temporal lobe epilepsy or frontal lobe epilepsy. It is common to associate focal epilepsies with the brain zone where epileptic seizures take place. However, recent studies show that there are many more regions involved in this disease. The scientific hypothesis of this work is that, through connectivity analysis, the existence and identification of differentiating patterns may help in the development of algorithms capable of adapting the parameters of the ANT-DBS to each subtype of epilepsy and, perhaps, to each patient. The next phase is to continue the study, extending the analysis to more patients, to validate the differences found.
Organised by INS, this was the first edition of the Iberian event of this medical society, held in Porto, on September 22 – bringing together the Spanish and Portuguese chapters, and formalising the establishment of the latter.
The researcher will also attend a course promoted by INS for free, and the international meeting of INS that will take place in Vancouver (2024).
The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with and UP-FEUP.
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