A new doctor in the neuroengineering team!

After 5 years of work in the team as PhD student, Dorian Vogel successfully defended his Doctoral thesis on the 3^rd of June 2022 in Linköping, Sweden. The thesis was co-financed by the School of Life Sciences, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, and the Swedish Research Council via the neuroengineering team at Linköping university (https://liu.se/en/research/neuroengineering-lab). The thesis was supervised by Prf. Karin Wårdell from Linköping University and Prf. Simone Hemm at the FHNW.

Dorian’s work, titled Deep Brain Stimulation Atlases in Movement Disorders – from Patient-Specific to Group Analysis, focused on providing means to analyze and visualize the multitude of data that is collected in the clinical process around the implantation of deep brain stimulation systems for individual patients with help of sensor-based evaluation of symptoms and electric field simulations. This was done with the data from patients affected with Essential tremor operated in France and Sweden. To analyze data from several patients together, synthetic brain templates were created for each group, resulting in the creation of an atlas of the deep brain defining the outlines of 58 anatomical structures of the deep brain, a region especially challenging to image using magnetic resonance imaging. The group templates were used of consolidate the data from all patients in the same reference space and allowed to use statistics to rate the significance of the improvement on the symptoms caused by the electric stimulation of brain tissue.

All these steps were published in six journal papers and are included in the thesis manuscript available at http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-184771.