The new research team NECTARINE at INRIA in Strasbourg / France aims to create a synergy between clinicians and scientists to develop new healthcare technologies. The team researchers collaborate closely with clinicians and choose their research focus along the clinical applications. Major scientific objectives are the development of advanced online- and offline simulations of neural activity on the macroscopic scale involving new numerical techniques for real-time computation and data-driven simulation dedicated to patient-specific modelling. The specific focus of the team's research is general anaesthesia, description of consciousness and attention and neurostimulation of patients suffering from mental disorders.

Clinical assessment of consciousness is a significant issue, with recent research suggesting some brain-damaged patients who are assessed as unconscious are in fact conscious. Misdiagnosis of consciousness can also be detrimental when it comes to general anaesthesia, causing numerous psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Avoiding awareness with overdose of anaesthetics, however, can also lead to cognitive impairment. Currently available objective assessment of consciousness is limited in accuracy or requires expensive equipment with major barriers to translation. In this talk, we will outline our recent theory-guided and data-driven approaches to develop new, optimized consciousness measures that will be robustly evaluated on an unprecedented breadth of high-quality neural data, recorded from the fly model system. We will overcome the subjective-choice problem in data-driven and theory-guided approaches with a comprehensive data analytic framework, which has never been applied to consciousness detection, integrating previously disconnected streams of research in consciousness detection to accelerate the translation of objective consciousness measures into clinical settings.