🗓️ March 26/27, 2026

📍Department of Mathematics (DIMA), Genova

About the event

The event aims to strengthen the collaboration between the DYNAMAP group at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes and the Bayesian Methods group at Univeristy of Genoa.  Both groups work on the localisation of neural sources from MEG (magnetoencephalography) data. However, they employ different source localisation approaches in their respective laboratories. This meeting will therefore provide an opportunity to compare complementary methods, exchange perspectives, and foster potential methodological synergies.

DYNAMAP  is located within a hospital, which makes it possible for them to use real data and clinical comparisons with doctors, making the research extremely applicable.

The Genoa research group, on the other hand, focuses on Bayesian methods, which not only allow the localisation of neural sources, but are also able to provide a measure of the uncertainty of the reconstruction.

The event is primarily intended to foster collaboration and scientific exchange between the two research groups through presentations and discussions. In addition, it will also include a public lecture open to a broader audience, creating an opportunity to share some of the themes and research directions discussed during the meeting with the wider community.

Through these activities, the event will support scientific exchange, comparison of methods, and the development of future research directions.

The project is supported in part by the Cassini Programme.

Can we see inside the brain? The case of pre-surgical diagnosis of epilepsy.

Christian-George Bénar, head of the Dynamap team at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Aix-Marseille University and Inserm.

For one-third of patients with epilepsy, medication alone is not enough to stop seizures. In these patients, it is possible to surgically remove the region of the brain causing the seizures in order to cure them. The success of the surgery depends crucially on the delineation of the pathological regions. In the initial phase of pre-surgical evaluation, non-invasive methods are used to "see" the regions of the brain where the epileptic discharges originate.

In this talk, I will present the various mathematical methods used to infer, from outside the head, the regions within the brain that are experiencing epileptic discharges, as well as recent developments in artificial intelligence and magnetoencephalography (MEG) sensors. In particular, I will present our work on simultaneous recordings of MEG and intracerebral EEG, which will allow improving the non-invasive methods based on a ground truth recorded directly within the brain.