Bruce J. Gluckman (Pennsylvania State University)

Abstract:
The involvement of sleep dynamics and sleep disruption and epilepsy syndromes has been marked in the clinical arena, but a deep understanding of the mechanistic link between the two has been lacking. Sleep state - the awareness level of the brain - is regulated through the interaction of a number of small cell groups between the brain stem and the thalamus. Direct measurement of their activity - and potentially their dysfunction as related to disease such as epilepsy or schizophrenia - is expensive both physically and in terms of damage to the brain of the subject. As an alternate approach to revealing these interactions, we have turned to a model-based data assimilation framework to link mathematical models of the sleep regulatory networks to less-costly experimental observations. I'll describe this framework, challenges we've solved, and open questions.