NYC Neuromodec: Day 1 Learnings (Pt 2)

The scene was set arriving at Neuromodec on Thursday; held at City College New York, the main hall within a huge chapel hosted a range of booths occupied by various neurostimulation companies. A little further into the hall a few 100 seats were set up facing the stage where the panels and talks for the day were held.

The overall first day went great. There were numerous talks on variations, results, drawbacks, and future work of different stimulation techniques. The techniques mentioned were Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), Temporal Interference (TI), Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCs), and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). An hour and a half of talks followed by brief breakout sessions took up the morning and afternoon.

The most curious learnings from the morning:

Temporal Interference

1. What is Temporal Interference? I wasn’t sure what exactly TI was. TI is when two high frequency currents with a slight frequency difference are injected into the brain. The frequency of the currents themselves is too high to impact the brains inner workings. However, a small frequency difference leads the waves to superimpose and cancel each other out at various regions. Given the current is a flow around the brain creating a circuit, there are parts of the circuit where the currents superimpose that lead to greater stimulation in those regions. The difference between this and other techniques is that it is a non-invasive technique that can reach deeper targets within the brain due to this vectorial superimposition.

I spoke directly with some of the staff from TI Solutions Inc who are a firm that have created their own TI device for use by researchers. There are various methods being developed in the TI space that are actively under research. One such technique is to phase modulate the currents instead of simply adding a small frequency perturbation to one of them. This leads to creation of custom waveforms of stimulation. Why is this useful? An answer I tried to dig into – the high level answer I got was that it leads to better dynamic modulation of electric currents with more channels for even finer targeting.

Targeting

1. ‘Targeting’ itself is a word consistently applied in the field. The core goal of stimulation devices is to target key regions of the brain to reach desired outcomes. So understanding which region to hit is integral. Many of the stimulation systems have an initial phase of modelling the brain to understand which regions need to be targeted – sometimes through fNIRs or FMRI technology. Once the target is identified, a stimulation system can be built to appropriately reach it.
2. With regards to TI, Sim4life are a company that have created a platform where one can upload and modify their own models of subjects brains to inform better targeting of TI systems. The way it works is a model of a subjects head is created. Then a region of interest to stimulate is selected. A number of simulations are conducted to verify which electrodes have the best chance of stimulating that region. So having a model of the head is key. These tools are exclusively for researchers.
3. Many of the companies had an EEG-TMS system whereby EEGs are used to read and analyse brain activity, this activity is then used to inform where to apply stimulation. I spoke with a company called Ant Neuro which specialised in this regard.

Biomarkers

Biomarkers were a key focal point. Biomarkers are used as an internal objective measure of the body’s/human state. Certain diseases such as addiction, ADHD, and other neuro-abnormalities have shown to have objective and measureable biomarkers. These biomarkers hold the key to closed loop stimulation or brain device systems. Actively monitoring the brains state, upon movement or change of the biomarker being measured, an action is taken to change the biomarkers state to a healthy normal, and once it returns the stimulation stops.

1. One of the speakers, Prasad Shivalkar, created such a system in development using DBS for pain perception. The results appeared remarkable with the subject reporting no pain on one of the evaluation dates.
2. Another point to quickly mention is that the predominant majority of personnel here are from an academic background so there is a huge focus on administrating and measuring various techniques for research papers. A key point made is that in the future easy to access home devices will be required to take clinical care from a lab setting into the homes of patients. Particularly elder patients. This point was made by Dr Daria Antonenko.

A debate point around biomarkers was whether or not every state of observable/identifiable disease/abnormality actually has an objective and measurable biomarker associated with it. The perspective that resonated with me is that as scientists there is a responsibility to try and explain why phenomena occurs but a more practical view is seeing it as ‘disease X exists, what treatment methods sufficiently nullify it?’ Which places the emphasis on results over interpretation. Both are important albeit one is more pragmatic than the other in my view. One of the speakers noted that perhaps not every state is measurable via biomarkers but ‘if even 60% of conditions have biomarkers associated, that’s a win’. The more knowledge, the better in other words.

Individual Alpha Frequency

• Individual Alpha Frequency (IAF) – alpha waves (7–11Hz) tend to be the most stable frequency in the brain. It has been found that each person has a resting alpha wave frequency. Some faster than others. This frequency serves as a baseline to your brains activity. In the event one’s brain is impacted or damaged, this resting frequency can change. Having a record of what it looks like in a healthy state allows practitioners to stimulate the brain back to this frequency. I spoke with Jay Kumar from Wave Neuroscience. He is their EEG specialist and told me they’re working on applying IAF-informed stimulation to a range of use cases including Autism, Depression, and most pressingly they are undergoing FDA approval to treat PTSD.

Evening Session Networking

The talks continued through till the early evening. Afterwards a cocktail and food session commenced giving everyone a chance to mingle and socialise. As mentioned, the community is dominated by researchers, academics, and stimulation companies. It was fairly difficult to find anyone outside of this. (I did meet one receiver of DBS who had Parkinsons.) Sharing my interest in BCI technology was received with intrigue and acknowledgement. Majority of the people I met were passionate and keen to see the developments of this type of technology.

It does strike me that no one really knows how to commercialise this technology however. EEG has been around since the 1920s but it’s deeper analysis has been around for even less time. Knowledge of this technology is rare among the public and hence the type of ‘mind-controlled’ devices that will appear over the next few decades is unclear. Many I spoke to received the idea of non-academics experimenting and seeking to push boundaries as very promising. I believe so too.

What was also promising to me is the presence of young minds at the conference. Many you g scientists studying PhDs and doctorates in the space. Many with a keen interest to commercialise their research projects and see the developments in the space occur by their own hands.

The focus for the next two days is to keep meeting and developing contacts with passionate and enthusiastic people. I will keep these blogs as high level as possible for now and once I return home I aim to read more and condense some more complicated topics into separate standalone ‘technical’ blog pieces.

More to come 📈