DPHIL START DATE

7 October 24

PROJECT TITLE

Predicting response to invasive neuromodulation in central neuropathic pain; a connectivity based model

SUPERVISORS

Professor Alex Green and Professor Saad Jbabdi

I am a medical honours student from the Netherlands, currently pursuing a DPhil in functional neurosurgery. I completed my bachelor’s degree in medicine at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. As an honours programme medical student, I was selected for a highly competitive programme awarded to the top 25 applicants from a pool of 430 students across the Medical Sciences Division. This programme provided an additional 8-10 hours of research training per week. My primary focus in this programme was on functional neurosurgery, particularly Motor Cortex Stimulation (MCS) for central neuropathic pain.

Additionally, I completed a summer internship in 2023 at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences (NDS) with the Oxford Functional Neurosurgery Group. During this summer internship, I conducted a feasibility study on functional connectivity analysis in neuropathic pain patients treated with MCS. The initial promising results and developed neuro-imaging pipeline laid the foundation for my DPhil project, which focuses on connectivity-based neuromodulation in invasive neuromodulation for central neuropathic pain.  This research strategy leverages the understanding of the interaction between neuromodulation and specific brain networks as a key mechanism in therapy response. Understanding this interaction enables more precise targeting of electrode leads, allowing for better outcome prediction in these severely affected patients.