CFP:-Modeling-Brain-Disorders

[Eytan Ruppin]

                           CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

     Special Issue of the Journal "Artificial Intelligence in Medicine"
                        (Published by Elsevier)

                 Theme: COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF BRAIN DISORDERS

              Guest-Editors: Eytan Ruppin  &  James A. Reggia

                      (Tel-Aviv University) (University of Maryland) 


      BACKGROUND

  As computational methods for brain modeling have advanced during the last
  several years, there has been an increasing interest in
  adopting them to study brain disorders in neurology,
  neuropsychology, and psychiatry.  Models of Alzheimer's disease,
  epilepsy, aphasia, dyslexia, Parkinson's disease, stroke and schizophrenia 
  have been recently studied to obtain a better understanding of the 
  underlying pathophysiological processes.
  While computer models have the disadvantage of simplifying the
  underlying neurobiology and the pathophysiology, they also
  have remarkable advantages: They
  permit precise and systematic control of the model variables,
  and an arbitrarily large number of ``subjects''.
  They are open to detailed inspection, in isolation, of the influence of
  various metabolic and neural variables on the disease progression, in the 
  hope of gaining insight into why observed behaviors occur. Ultimately,
  one seeks a sufficiently powerful model that can be used to
  suggest new pharmacological interventions and rehabilitative actions.


  OBJECTIVE OF SPECIAL ISSUE

  The objective of this special issue on modeling brain disorders
  is to report on the recent studies in this field. The main goal is to
  increase the awareness of the  AI medical community to this research,
  currently primarily performed by members of the neural networks and 
  `connectionist' community. By bringing together a series of such brain 
  disorders modeling papers, we strive to produce a contemporary overview 
  of the kinds of problems and solutions that this growing research field 
  has generated, and to point to future promising research directions.

  More specifically, papers are expected to cover one or more of the
  following topics:

  -- Specific neural models of brain disorders, expressing the link between
     their pathogenesis and clinical manifestations.

  -- Computational models of pathological alterations in basic neural, 
     synaptic and metabolic processes, that may relate to the generation 
     of brain disorders in a significant manner.

  -- Applications of neural networks that shed light on the pathogenic
     processes that underlie brain disorders, or explore their temporal
     evolution and clinical course.

  -- Methodological issues involved in constructing computational models
     of brain disorders; obtaining sufficient data, visualizing 
     high-dimensional complex behavior, and testing and validating these 
     models.

  -- Bridging the apparent gap between functional imaging investigations 
     and current neural modeling studies, arising from their distinct
     spatio-temporal resolution.

  
  SCHEDULE

  All the submitted manuscripts will be subject to a rigorous review 
  process. The special issue will include 5 papers of 15-20 pages
  each, plus an editorial. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance
  with the journal "submission guidelines" which are available on request,
  and may also be retrieved from http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~ruppin.

  November 15, 1996       Submission of tentative title and abstract 
                          to declare intension to submit paper. This
                          should be done electronically, to 

                          ruppin at math.tau.ac.il.

  March 15, 1997          Receipt of full papers. Three copies of a manuscript
                          should be sent to:

                          Eytan Ruppin
                          Department of Computer Science
                          School of Mathematics
                          Tel-Aviv University
                          Tel-Aviv, Israel, 69978.
                          
  August 1, 1997          Notification of acceptance

  October 1, 1997         Receipt of final-version of manuscripts

  June 1998               Publication of AIM special issue