March Meetings
MTEC State of the Technology Meeting
Washington, D.C. || March 12-13, 2024
On March 12th & 13th, we attended a State of the Technology meeting focused on non-invasive neuroassessment tools. The goals of this meeting was to understand the state of the technology to: a) better diagnose traumatic brain injury (TBI) at all levels of the continuum of care, b) understand how to monitor patients already diagnosed with TBI, and c) identify new potential products that could be developed into prototypes for the diagnosis, assessment, and monitoring of TBI.
The meeting opened with Dr. JB Phillips providing some sobering vignettes of soldiers that survived service to their country, but succumbed to the hidden enemy of TBI. Next was a panel of civilians including athletes and a Navy Seal who suffered TBIs with discussions on how it affected their lives.
There were other sessions on the new TBI Classification, regulatory issues, and AI. We provided one of the two AI talks on the AI Ecosystem we are building. A key part of the meeting was an afternoon/evening of small (and large) companies showing their technology developments related to TBI.
Below is a shot from a panel called “Lived Experiences.” From left to right: Kasey Moritz (co-host, U.S. Army), Lonie Paxton (former NFL long snapper), Koby Stevens (Australian Football League star), Pete Scobell (Navy Seal, skier, and musician), Kevin Pearce (former Olympic snowboard hopeful), and Janelle Hurwitz (co-host, BARDA).
L to R: Kasey Moritz, Lonie Paxton, Koby Stevens, Pete Scobell, Kevin Pearce, Janelle Hurwitz
Below: Kevin Pearce and one of his fans (Dick Moberg). As a long-time snowboarder, I’ve followed Kevin since his accident and met him at a neurotrauma meeting about ten years ago. I recommended he speak at this technology conference and he accepted and brought along the other panelists. They were filming a documentary at the meeting that should be out within the year.
Kevin & Dick
Dick Moberg followed Dr. Alan Kaplan (Lawrence Livermore Labs) in the AI session and showed our work on integrating AI technology into the battlefield and ICU.
We partied the first night with the Lived Experience panelists, as it was Lonie Paxton’s birthday the next day. The evening was one of the most interesting ones I’ve had, and I’ve done a lot of interesting stuff.
Dr. Jana Kainerstorfer (Carnegie Mellon University) was with us and tried on Lonie’s Super Bowl ring. A bit large for her.
SOPRANI Meeting
Leuven, Belgium || March 6, 2024
Smart neuOmonitoring to support PRecision medicine in Acute central Nervous Injury (SOPRANI) is a European project aimed at training a new workforce for neurocritical care and AI. The SOPRANI network consists of 7 European research institutions and 1 non-academic partner, and has recently been granted a European MSCA Doctoral Training Network grant to train and guide 10 doctoral candidates in 10 individual research projects that are intended to substantially advance the field of neuromonitoring in patients with acute brain injury in neuro-intensive care.
Moberg Analytics is honored to serve as the non-academic partner and the only non-European entity in this ground-breaking project. PhD students will visit and work at the company to understand data harmonization and data analytic tools specifically for neurocritical care. We are excited to participate in training this future workforce.
The first in-person PI meeting was held in Leuven, Belgium on March 6; I flew over for a half-day meeting (short but very informative). It was great to see many friends. We had dinner afterwards in a little restaurant in Leuven that was one of the best I’ve ever had.
At dinner with some of the SOPRANI PIs: Peter Smielewski, Dick Moberg, Ewout Steyerberg, Raimund Helbok, Bart Depreitere, Alan Urban.
Leuven is a small town with a large and prestigious university. They hosted the ICP meeting in 2019. It’s a very old town with many quaint narrow streets filled with great restaurants and bars. The university is on the cutting edge of AI in neurocritical care.
