From Grenoble Institut Neurosciences (GIN)

will give a seminar entitled:

Brain electrical stimulation: a clinical tool that stimulates fundamental research

This talk is about how in vivo electrophysiology can be used to study large scale brain networks using various examples. I will first remind very general principles of brain’s functional organisation at a large scale. I will then illustrate how clinical techniques such as deep brain stimulation clearly demonstrate functional specialization of both cortical and subcortical areas. Examples will consider Parkinson’s disease, obsessive compulsive disorders and epilepsy. On a more fundamental aspect, I will then show how brief electrical pulses allow to reconstruct brain circuitry and local neuronal properties in human (Trebaul et al, 2018). More preliminary data will also be presented on how we are currently translating this stimulation technique for interrogating mechanisms of action of drug compounds in vivo in rodents. Finally, I will present the recent work we did to unravel from electrophysiology a new subcortical pathway for pain processing in rodent which was motivated by chronic pain often experienced by Parkinsonian patients (Pautrat et al, 2018).

References:

Trebaul et al., Probabilistic functional tractography of the human cortex revisited, Neuroimage. 2018 Nov 1,181:414-429

Pautrat et al., Revealing a novel nociceptive network that links the subthalamic nucleus to pain processing. Elife. 2018 Aug 28,7. pii: e36607