Recently,
I made a short visit (only the first day) to the joined conferences
16th Nordic-Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical
Physics and 10th Medicinteknikdagarna in Gothenburg to present our fMRI
model in the neuroengineering session.
It was a small but rather well attended conference with a leisurely
tempo that gave ample time for discussions. There were several
researchers form Linköping present, although not from our group.
Unfortunately most of us were placed in the same session and
although I found Haj-Hosseinis talk about ”Photodiagnostics in Brain
Tumor Surgery”, Dunås talk about ”Towards automatic identification of
cerebral arteries in 4D flow MRI” and Latorres talk about ”Paxon: The
Physical Axon Model” interesting, I had heard them
before.
Most inspiring during the day were two different presentations: the
first was the plenary session where Dremstrup spoke about ”Technology in
the rehabilitation after stroke” and showed how they had identified the
right point in time and space to deliver a small
electric chock to nerves in the foot or hip in order to help stroke
patients walk again, and the second was ”Human stem cell neuronal
cultures and activity – from 2D to 3D” with the finnish researcher
Hyttinen who experimented on neuronal stem cells growing
in a 3D matrix. The latter is something that is highly interesting for
our research as it investigates the actions of the astrocytes in the
brain.
My presentation was well received and led to interesting discussions
afterwards, most notably with Hyttinen and later with a medical doctor
who proposed TENS for stimulation of brain areas.
Karin Lundengård
PhD student at IMH and CMIV
