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Clinical brain-computer interfaces: Challenges and new applications
11/4/22, 11:50 AM - 11/4/22, 12:20 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) (30 minutes)
Prof. Surjo Soekadar, MD
Einstein Professor of Clinical Neurotechnology Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Prof. Surjo Soekadar, MD
Einstein Professor of Clinical Neurotechnology Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Surjo R. Soekadar, MD, studied medicine in Mainz, Heidelberg and Baltimore. After a Research Fellowship at the Human Cortical Physiology and Stroke Neurorehabilitation Section (HCPS) at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS, NIH, USA), he continued his work at the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany, where he became head of the Applied Neurotechnology Laboratory. In 2018, he transitioned his group to the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, where is became Germany’s first Professor of Clinical Neurotechnology. He is currently head of the research division ‘Translation and Neurotechnology’ and medical head of the Center for Translational Neuromodulation. Dr. Soekadar received various prizes and awards such as the NIHDFG Research Career Transition Award, the NIH Fellows’ Award for Research Excellence, the International BCI Research Award as well as the BIOMAG and NARSAD Young Investigator Awards.

Despite tremendous technological progress over the last years, many neurotechnological tools have not arrived in clinical routine care yet. Dr. Soekadar will provide an overview of clinical neurotechnologies, such as clinical brain/neural machine interfaces, that proofed to be effective in alleviating various disorders of the brain. He will depict why these tools have not entered broader clinical use and elaborate on the challenges ahead. Moreover, he will specifically argue for the combination of real-time neuroimaging and neuromodulation to establish adaptive closed-loop brain stimulation as an important step towards personalized and targeted treatments of neurological and psychiatric disorders. His talk will also discuss current and future developments in the field that include the use of quantum sensors and temporal interference magnetic stimulation (TIMS). Finally, he will sketch the neuroethical challenges that arise when integrating neurotechnologies with AI-enabled systems.