Session Description: Join us for a high-energy, rapid-fire debate tackling the most pressing ethical and socioeconomic dilemmas in the management of cancer-related pain. This dynamic session will explore controversies surrounding interventional pain therapies for patients with cancer and cancer survivors. Experts will debate critical issues such as equitable access to advanced pain treatments, the duty to relieve suffering, and the ethical considerations of interventional therapies versus pharmacologic approaches.
Structured as a fast-paced debate, this session will challenge perspectives and encourage discussion, providing a thought-provoking and interactive experience. Panelists will present opposing viewpoints on these complex topics. Expect compelling arguments and practical insights into navigating ethical challenges in cancer pain management. This session will deepen your understanding of the ethical tensions in cancer pain care and inspire new approaches to patient-centered decision-making.
Session Description: Management for complex facial pain disorders is a constant challenge for pain physicians, neurologists and neurosurgeons. This session aims to provide management options that focus on patient selection, surgical technique and outcomes .
This session will cover innovative treatments for facial deafferentation pain and painful trigeminal neuropathy. We will review the clinical differences between facial deafferentation pain and classic trigeminal neuralgia. We will review historical treatments for this difficult to treat population and discuss newer treatment options including high-cervical spinal cord stimulation that have shown promise.
Session Description: Pelvic pain remains a challenging condition requiring a multimodal approach for effective management. This panel will explore the latest advancements in interventional therapies, including Dorsal Root Ganglion (DRG) stimulation, Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS), Peripheral Nerve Stimulation (PNS), Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA), and pudendal nerve blocks.
Expert panelists will discuss patient selection, procedural techniques, and outcome optimization for these modalities in the treatment of chronic pelvic pain syndromes, including pudendal neuralgia, post-surgical pain, interstitial cystitis, and pelvic floor dysfunction. The session will feature clinical insights to illustrate best practices in tailoring interventions to individual patient needs.
Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of:
- The role of DRG stimulation in targeting focal pelvic pain
- Advances in SCS for widespread pain relief and neuromodulation strategies
- PNS applications for pelvic floor and lower abdominal pain
- The efficacy of RFA in pelvic pain
- The utility of pudendal nerve blocks as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool
By highlighting the interplay between these interventions, this panel will provide a framework for a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to pelvic pain management.
Session Description: In this session, we will explore the quickly growing field of brain stimulation for generalized epilepsy. One third of drug-resistant epilepsy patients have a generalized epilepsy syndrome, and there were previously few surgical options for this patients. There are now three neuromodulation options to choose from – DBS, RNS, and VNS. We will discuss how to choose between these options for an individual patient. We will also explore patient selection, programming strategies, and outcomes for closed loop responsive neurostimulation for generalized epilepsy patients. Given the importance of accurate patient-specific thalamic targeting in brain stimulation for epilepsy, we will also discuss advanced strategies to improve target selection and seizure outcome.
Session Description: There is a remarkable appetite for innovation amongst healthcare institutions, but it is largely fraught with limited success. Why? Health systems are designed to deliver safe patient care while minimizing expenditure in efforts to maintain diminishing profitability. This overwhelming environment severely limits a culture of risk-tolerant and disruptive innovation. Perhaps, it is time healthcare institutions learn from Silicon Valley – the epicenter of startup culture. The key factors contributing to the immensely successful entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley include pursuit of disruption, collaboration, risk tolerance, and a resilient work ethic. Founders of some of the most successful companies from Silicon Valley (i.e. Apple, Facebook, Tesla, eBay, etc.) have a common story – they thought big, they moved fast, they embraced failure, they recruited a great team, and they constantly evolved a great product. Today, these companies have market capitalization over one trillion dollars (USD).
In this session, we will evaluate and discuss the implementation of these factors within large academic health institutions in efforts to design an impactful innovation program inspired by Silicon Valley. In addition, we will highlight specific examples of successful innovation projects, licensing agreements, acquisition, and conversion to independent spin-off companies.
Session Description: As neuromodulation enters a new era of innovation, it becomes increasingly vital to revisit its scientific foundations while exploring how we define, measure, and validate clinical success. Foundation and Future in Neuromodulation Science will bring together three renowned thought leaders whose landmark work has shaped how we understand the mechanisms and evaluate the outcomes of neuromodulation.
This session will begin with a presentation by Dr. Apkar Vania Apkarian, a pioneering neuroscientist whose use of advanced neuroimaging has provided unprecedented insights into the mechanisms of pain and neuromodulation. His work using functional MRI to characterize brain circuitry alterations in chronic pain has laid the groundwork for mechanism-targeted therapies. Following this presentation, Dr. Sean Mackey, who is an expert in clinical outcomes research and pain measurement, will present on how we quantify the treatment effects of neuromodulation and pain interventions, exploring the interplay between objective data and the lived patient experience.
Following these presentations, a moderated panel discussion will provide an opportunity for interactive dialogue with the speakers, exploring implications for trial design, biomarker development, and translational science.
This plenary will conclude with the introduction of the NANS President and the delivery of the Presidential Address and Lifetime Achievement Award, spotlighting both the current and future landscape and legacy of leadership in neuromodulation.
Session Description: This session features the most up-to-date research and emerging discoveries, offering timely insights into evolving trends and future directions in the neuromodulation field.
Session Description: Join us for an exciting exploration of first-in-human clinical experience using high-resolution cortical arrays in the intraoperative environment. Developments in brain computer interface (BCI) technologies have resulted in flexible, thin-film arrays with 100s to 1,000s of microelectrodes to record neural activity at high-resolution without penetrating the brain. This non-damaging approach has enabled short-duration testing of BCIs during standard neurosurgical procedures such as deep brain stimulation implantation or tumor resection. In this context, we can decode awake behaviors and map functional brain regions, revealing neural patterns at resolutions never before seen. In this session, you’ll hear firsthand from the neurosurgeons and scientists at the forefront of implementing this technology in the operating room. Details will be shared on best practices for deploying high-resolution thin-film arrays during burr-hole and open craniotomy procedures and designing intraoperative experiment paradigms compatible with standard surgical workflows. You’ll also discover exciting scientific results of real-time decoding of hand gestures and speech using only minutes of intraoperative data, and methods for two-dimensional microscale mapping of neuro-anotomical boundaries. This session will spark discussions of creative intraoperative experimental paradigms, hypotheses, and surgical approaches for testing high-resolution, thin-film BCIs.
Session Description: Neuromodulation is a rapidly advancing field of medicine that can offer promising treatments for patients who suffer from chronic pain and other neurological and psychiatric comorbidities but also raises significant ethical concerns. These include access and equity, implanter bias, data and privacy security, and ethical issues when dealing with minors. The session will explore these ethical attributes and emphasize the need for a framework to guide ethical applications in neuromodulation technologies.