CMU Virtual Neural Engineering Seminar
Speaker: Dr. Christian-G. Bénar, PhD, Head of the Dynamap Team, Inserm/Aix-Marseille University
Abstract: Intracerebral EEG recordings are performed in patients during presurgical evaluation of epilepsy, on purely clinical grounds. Still, they provide a formidable opportunity for clinical research to record electrophysiological signals directly within the brain. These signals can be used to better understand the relationships between actual brain activity and signals measured at the surface of the head. In particular, they provide a unique ground truth for validating the inverse problem of electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), for epileptic discharges or cognitive activity. As the state of the brain fluctuates in time, the only way to ensure that the exact same activity is recorded in MEG/EEG and intracerebral EEG is to acquire the signals simultaneously. This is a challenging task, but one that has been mastered and can now be performed in routine. This has applications in clinical evaluation, but also in more fundamental questions such as visibility of deep sources in MEG and EEG in epilepsy and cognition. In this talk, I will review the results obtained in my group within the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes and the Timone hospital in Marseille on simultaneous MEG and intracerebral EEG recordings. I will also present recent results on optically pumped magnetometers recorded simultaneously with intracerebral EEG.
About the Speaker: After my engineering studies at Ecole Supélec (Paris), with specialization in signal processing I worked as scientific of the contingent in the hospital Sainte Anne, Toulon, on EEG analysis. I was hired as a programmer at Stellate Systems (Montréal, Canada) to develop software for EEG analysis in epilepsy. I then did my PhD at the Montreal Neurological Institute on simultaneous EEG-fMRI for epilepsy, under the supervision of Prof. Jean Gotman. After two postdocs in Marseille and Sophia Antipolis, I joined Inserm as a researcher in 2006. Since 2012, I am the head of the Dynamap team at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (Inserm/Aix-Marseille University), and I have been since 2015 the scientific head of the magnetoencephalography platform of Marseille, located within the Timone hospital (Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille). My research focuses on signal processing for epilepsy and for brain mapping, with particular focus on MEG, intracerebral EEG and simultaneous MEG/SEEG recordings. I am leading the Anywave project, an open-access software for analysis of brain signals (available at ).