Summer Science Trifecta
Each year there are events I attend where I get on a “technology high” from listening to talks, meeting people, discussing ideas, and being immersed in the moment. Three of those are packed into the last two weeks of August which means my brain battery charge should last well into the Fall. Unfortunately, two of them are overlapping. The Military Health Systems Research Symposium (MHSRS) is the same week as the Neurocritical Care Society (NCS). This was due to a COVID-related change in the NCS meeting schedule from several years ago.
The topics at MHSRS are broad and cover all health issues facing military personnel. There has always been interest in brain injury but in prior conflicts (like Afghanistan) rapid evacuation to a field hospital was standard for TBI. In looking to the future, the military believes more conflicts will be like the war in Ukraine where there is no air superiority and the local hospital may have been destroyed.
In this scenario, called prolonged care, you need to manage a TBI patient with very limited resources for up to a few days. For severe TBI you might think this is fatalistic from the start without a CT scan and hemicraniectomy, but some interesting technology is being developed for non-invasive monitoring…. and even putting in an EVD pre-hospital. Last year I made a video that surveyed brain technology at MHSRS. You can watch that here.
I’ll be making another for those who can’t go to the meeting. Several folks who I normally see at NCS told me they will be at MHSRS this year. I’m going to try to do both. I give a talk on Tuesday at MHSRS and then hop on a plane from Orlando to Phoenix early Wednesday morning (yes… two cities to definitely visit in August!).
It’s unfortunate that NCS was saddled with the August time slot in Phoenix this year where the temperature is predicted to be over 110F (43C). But the hard core neuro folks will be there, and I’m still looking forward to it. The theme is Beyond the Horizon with the opening keynote on AI. The poster sessions are a favorite, and wandering through them with a glass of wine is inspirational. We will report on the NCS meeting in the September newsletter.
And the meeting trifecta is rounded out by Burning Man during the last week of August. In 2019, DaiWai Olson said what was needed for the Curing Coma Campaign was “community and creativity.” Anyone who has been to Burning Man knows this event is the epicenter of those two concepts. So that year, we formed Coma Camp with the idea to get some of the creative people at the event to start thinking about coma. COVID pushed off those plans, but this year it’s happening. We have joined a camp of neuroscientists called Campus Callosum.
We are having an event called “Coma and Consciousness” where we discuss what coma can tell us about consciousness and what consciousness can tell us about coma. Dr. Janis Hesse (UC Berkeley) will talk about consciousness and Dr. Deb Hemmerle (UCSF, Neuroscience Nurse) will talk about coma. I will moderate the discussion. Dr. Jana Kainerstorfer (Carnegie Mellon, who I met at NCS last year) is talking about non-invasive ICP and monitoring the brains of dolphins. And Kate Reed will be talking about non-invasive sensors, controlling a kinetic sculpture with EEG, and mushroom computing.
So this will be a packed month of summer science meetings and I look forward to seeing some of you there.
Update: here’s the report on our attendance at these great events!
