Christophe Bernard
Biography
Director of Research, Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Inserm and Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France
Editor in Chief of eNeuro
WEBSITE: https://ins-amu.fr/physionet
Christophe Bernard is Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Inserm U1106, in Marseilles, France. He obtained a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Paris VI university, did his postdoc at Southampton university, and a sabbatical In Houston (Baylor). His main interest is to understand brain dynamics in health and disease, with a focus on epilepsy (Michael Prize). He participated in the development of organic technologies to record and control brain activity (Felix Innovation Prize) and in The Virtual Mouse Brain (a platform that allows the virtualization of individual mouse brain to study whole brain dynamics in silico). He acts as a reviewing editor for Science Advances, and formerly for Science and Journal of Neuroscience. He created and is the Editor in Chief of eNeuro, the online open access journal of the Society for Neuroscience. eNeuro is designed to serve and educate the community, promoting reproducibility, publishing negative results, and sensitizing scientists to open science and better data interpretation with a focus on statistics and experimental bias.
Digital twin technology to better understand and treat the brain
Each brain is unique. A personalised approach is thus necessary to treat neurological disorders. This approach needs to be at the organ scale as all brain regions interact with each other in a complex manner. Whole brain modelling allows investigating mechanisms in individuals. Such models rely on identifying the rough anatomy (the regions) and how regions are connected to each other (the connectome), information that is provided by MRI. I will show how individual human and rodent brains can be virtualised, and the type of information that can be extracted. I will provide a concrete example of a successful use of digital twin technology to improve neurosurgery outcome in epilepsy.
