Plenary Session

9:00 -  10:00 a.m.
(Pavilion Salons A-B)

Dynamics of Respiratory Neural Networks During Maturation

Dr. Metin Akay, Darmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Overview: Neural engineering is an emerging discipline to understand the organizational principles and underlying mechanisms of the biology of neural systems and to study the behavior dynamics and complexity of neural systems in nature.

It coalesces the engineering including electronic and photonic technologies, computer science, physics, chemistry, mathematics with the molecular, systems, cellular, cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. Therefore, the neural engineering deals with many aspects of basic and clinical problems associated with neural dysfunction including the representation of sensory and motor information, the electrical stimulation of the neuromuscular system to control the muscle activation and movement, the analysis and visualization of complex neural systems at mutli-scale from the single-cell and to the system levels to understand the underlying mechanisms, electrical stimulation of the cochlea, the development of novel electronic and photonic devices for experimental probing, the simulation studies, the design and development of human-machine interface systems and artificial vision sensors and neural posthesis to restore and enhance the impaired sensory and motor systems and functions.

In this presentation, we will present the ongoing research activities at the Neural Engineering and Informatics Lab at Dartmouth. We will discuss our recent finding about the relative contributions of maturation to the dynamical behavior of respiration during ontogeny in the neonate. We define and quantify changes in the complexity of the respiratory neural network that accompany maturation in piglets using the approximate entropy method which provides a model independent measure of the complexity (irregularity) of the underlying mechanisms of the respiratory network.
 

Metin Akay, Associate Professor of Engineering, Psychology and Brain Sciences, and Computer Science at Dartmouth received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1981 and 1984, respectively and a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University in 1990.
Prof. Akay has played a key role in promoting the biomedical education in the world by writing several prestigious books and editing the IEEE Biomedical Engineering Book Series. He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of Eta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, The American Heart Association, and The New York Academy of Science. He also serves on the advisory board of several international journals including the IEEE T-BME, IEEE T-ITIB, Smart Engineering Systems etc. and NIH Bioengineering partnership study session and several NSF review panels.
He is a recipient of the IEEE EMBS Career Service for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of the scientific stature and visibility of IEEE-EMBS and extraordinary dedication to the promotion of biomedical engineering education in the world. He also received the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award 1997 for outstanding contributions in the detection of coronary artery disease, in understanding of early human development, and leadership and contributions in biomedical engineering education.