Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club with Lou Zonca, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
"Modeling disorders of consciousness at the patient level reveals the network's influence on the diagnosis vs the local node parameters role in prognosis"
The Cognitive Neuroscience Club is hosting monthly seminars on the topic Cognitive Neuroscience. On Tuesday 8 October 2024, we welcome Lou Zonca, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract
Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) group a wide spectrum of conditions ranging from coma to more aware (awake) states of consciousness but for patients which remain largely unable to communicate. Although there are universal clinical procedures, such as the Glasgow coma scale-revised (GCS-R), to assess the level of consciousness of a DoC patient, precise diagnosis and prognosis remains a challenge.
In this talk, I will discuss my current work regarding the development of DoC mathematical models calibrated at the single-patient level. The ultimate goal is to use these models as digital twins to propose better biomarkers, enhance prognosis, and test potential therapeutic approaches using numerical simulations.
I will present my latest results regarding the construction of a modeling pipeline that takes DoC patients' fMRI resting state data as an input and provides automatically fitted mathematical models for each patient. The fitted parameters of the models provide us with two types of biomarkers: (1) The connectivity matrices, revealing the network interactions at the global brain scale, tend to give us information regarding the diagnosis of the patients, i.e. the severity of their condition. (2) On the other hand, the local node parameters tend to correlate to other relevant clinical information such as age, etiology and prognosis.