Assistant Professor of Neurology and Biophysics Brain Stimulation, Adaptation, and Fractional Dynamics
Title: "Brain Stimulation, Adaptation, and Fractional Dynamics"
Bioelectronic medicine diagnoses and treats neurological diseases using electricity, the language of the brain. Despite recent advances, assessing brain excitability remains difficult. We suggest that negative feedback control mechanisms of neural circuits, such as neural adaptation, may be evident at the macroscale level and allow us to assess neural excitability. Most excitatory cortical neurons demonstrate adaptation. Our work has shown that adaptation can include many response timescales and can approximate a ~0.15-0.5 derivative of the stimulus, a mathematical operation called fractional differentiation. That is, even single neurons can perform calculus. Fractional derivatives are related to power laws, history dependence, and a wide range of response timescales. Adaptation affects network excitability, stability, and efficient information processing. Evidence of adaptation and fractional dynamics may be seen in EEG recordings and provide a window to underlying excitability.
Biography:
Brian N. Lundstrom, M.D., Ph.D., is an assistant professor of neurology and biophysics in the Division of Epilepsy at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Following a Fulbright Scholarship for neuroimaging research at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he obtained an M.D. and PhD in Biophysics and Neuroscience as well as an M.Sc. degree in Applied Physics from the University of Washington in Seattle. He completed neurology residency at the University of Washington and two years of fellowship training at Mayo Clinic in EEG and epilepsy. Dr. Lundstrom is a practicing epileptologist with a background in computational neuroscience, specializing in brain stimulation. He manages the Neuromodulation Clinic in the Division of Epilepsy and noninvasive brain stimulation approaches for clinical care.
Dr. Lundstrom’s research focuses on neurophysiology, invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation, EEG biomarkers, and computational neuroscience applied to cortical excitability. His initial work as a graduate student demonstrated that even single neurons can perform a kind of calculus termed fractional differentiation. He is director of the NIH funded Brain Adaptation and Stimulation Lab, which focuses on assessing neural excitability to guide brain stimulation. He recently received an NIH R01 grant to study novel brain stimulation waveforms.
Dr. Lundstrom has served as reviewer for over 25 scientific journals from JAMA Neurology and Lancet Neurology to Chaos and Neural Computation, and he is a standing member of an NINDS biomarker/brain stimulation study section. Once a circus performer, he spends his leisure time trying to convince his wife and 7- and 8-year-old boys to take him seriously.