Our Report On ACNS 2023
American Clinical Neurophysiology Society (ACNS) Annual Meeting
Austin, Texas || March 25-29, 2023
The American Clinical Neurophysiology Society meeting was held last month in downtown Austin, Texas. Our group was fortunate enough to attend and meet with long-time friends, colleagues, and collaborators. We would like to congratulate Dr. Tom Bleck, one of the founding fathers of the field of neurocritical care, who was awarded the prestigious Pierre Gloor Award.
In his remarks, Tom recounted much of his history in clinical neurophysiology, from a young, curious, long-haired scientist to his current position as a grandfather. Some of that history is also recounted in our podcast that we recorded with him several years ago. You can listen to that here.
A particular slide in his presentation brought back memories of an interesting time in the mid-1990’s when Tom (using the Neurotrac II shown below) was likely the first person to track seizures in critical care using a quantitative EEG metric, in this case the spectral edge frequency (also shown below).
I also ran into my good friend Jean Gotman (below) at ACNS 2023. I started my PhD thesis (never finished) using his just-invented method for automatic seizure detection. At that time it was freely distributed. We got it on a magnetic tape for our PDP-11 computer when I was working with Dr. Richard Harner. We also recorded a fun conversation of how Jean got started in all this and created the EEG company, Stellate, from his bedroom. You can listen to that here.
Another highlight of the meeting for us was a table-against-table Kahoot challenge on EEG background patterns hosted during the Special Interest Group Kickoff for ICU EEG. Although we were nowhere close to winning, we did enjoy the company and catching up with our friends.
