Abstract
Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disease whose hallmark is recurring seizures, bursts of abnormal electrical activity within the brain, that can have a debilitating impact on activities of daily living. It affects more than 50 million people worldwide, with 30% of cases being resistant to available drug treatment. Surgical treatment of medication-resistant epilepsy depends upon accurate localization of the epileptogenic zone (EZ), the regions of brain that are necessary and sufficient to generate seizures. This talk discusses emerging hardware and analytical tools for characterizing epileptogenic activity within the human brain, tools which hold promise for improving EZ localization and ultimately the outcomes from epilepsy surgery.

Biosketch
Dr. Blanco is a professor and former department chair at the United States Naval Academy, where he heads the Signal Processing and Data Science Research Group. He is currently on sabbatical at Lund University. His areas of research interest include neural signal processing and machine learning-assisted care in diseases such as epilepsy, and control algorithms for neural prosthetic systems and implantable medical devices. Prior to joining the faculty at USNA, he received the ScB, MS, and PhD degrees from Brown University, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, and worked as a Design Engineer at Medtronic.