Emery Brown - Rethinking General Anesthesia (October 20, 2021)

General anesthesia is a drug-induced, reversible condition comprised of five behavioral states: unconsciousness, amnesia (loss of memory), antinociception (loss of pain sensation), akinesia (immobility), and hemodynamic stability with control of the stress response.

In this lecture, Emery Brown will discuss work by him and his colleagues showing that a primary mechanism through which anesthetics create these altered states of arousal is by initiating and maintaining highly structured oscillations. These oscillations impair communication among brain regions. Brown and collaborators illustrate this effect by presenting human and non-human primate studies using high-density EEG and intracranial recordings. These studies have allowed them to give a detailed characterization of the neurophysiology of loss and recovery of consciousness due to propofol, and more recently, ketamine. In addition, they show how these dynamics change systematically with different anesthetic classes and with age.

Consequently, they have developed a principled, neuroscience-based paradigm for using the EEG to monitor the brain states of patients receiving general anesthesia. In addition, they demonstrate that the state of general anesthesia can be rapidly reversed by activating specific brain circuits. Finally, they show that the state of general anesthesia can be controlled using closed-loop feedback control systems. The success of their research has depended critically on tight coupling of experiments, signal processing research and mathematical modeling. More details: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/rethinking-general-anesthesia/

Видео Emery Brown - Rethinking General Anesthesia (October 20, 2021) канала Simons Foundation