Functional neurosurgery improves the lives of patients suffering from neurological conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and movement disorders including dystonia and essential tremor, with the goal of decreasing the symptoms of these conditions. The field of functional neurosurgery has benefited from recent developments in biomedical engineering, computer science, imaging technology, and neuroscience.
The goal of functional neurosurgery research in the Anderson Laboratory is to develop models to understand how brain function is affected by these conditions and how this abnormal function might be corrected or minimized by neuromodulation through electrical stimulation. The lab uses data collected from patients during monitoring or in the operating room to construct computational models of epilepsy as a way to learn more about how seizures develop, and how and where they spread in the brain. The models can be manipulated to explore functional changes and treatment possibilities. Other projects include the development of a neuromodulation system that applies stimulation pulses at specific phases of brain oscillatory activity.