Can real-time signal processing and analysis help the surgeon?
The Study Group Mathematics with Industry (SWI) workshops aim at bringing mathematicians (and occasionally computer scientists) together for a week to work on some difficult unsolved industrial problem. Besides reinforcing scientific, industrial and social relations, participants are challenged to come up with a fresh perspective on the problem and more often than not this leads to directly usable results and methods for industry. This year’s workshop, organized at the University of Twente in the Netherlands (28 January – 1 February 2008), hosted a project on the real-time classification of single-neuron recordings, jointly proposed by Philips Research and the Amsterdam Academic Medical Centre, who have been collaborating on this topic for some time. The problem involves helping neurosurgeons get their bearings during deep brain surgery. The method currently used involves inserting fine needles into the brain to record neuron action potentials for periods of about ten seconds, converti
