Anesthetized brain network: how does anesthetic affect functional connections in the brain?
* SPEAKERS
Name
Affiliation
E-mail
UnCheol Lee
Univ. of Michigan Medical School
uclee(at)med.umich.edu
* HOST(Applicant)
Name
Affiliation
E-mail
Jihye Jeong
APCTP
sec(at)apctp.org
* DATE / TIME
2011-09-02, 11:00am
* PLACE
Conference room 503, APCTP Headquarters, Pohang, Korea
* ABSTRACT
Over 40 million patients undergo general anesthesia each year in North America alone. Despite the routine use of general anesthesia for more than 160 years, the mechanisms of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness remain elusive. The finding of common functional mechanism over diverse anesthetics is an important issue. Two potential mechanisms for anesthetic induced unconsciousness have been studied: (a) anesthetic suppresses information integration capacity in the brain (b) anesthetic inhibits the feedback connection selectively in the frontal parietal network. To justify the hypotheses, we applied computational methods, and developed new analytic techniques to understand how global information integration is achieved over the brain, and how the global structure of the brain changes at state transitions of consciousness. The findings regarding these hypotheses could be translated to intraoperative monitoring technique for the depth of consciousness. Furthermore, in this talk, I will introduce the theoretic background for consciousness study, and explain why anesthesia and physics for complex systems are important tools for consciousness study.
