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I am Julia Varotto. I'm a Italian neuroscientist, 
and currently I'm working in the Laboratory  

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for Clinical Neuroscience in the Center for 
Biomedical Technology of the UPM of Madrid. 

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My main topic of research has 
been in the field of epilepsy. 

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More or less 30% of patients with epilepsy 
that can`t be cured with medication,  

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that are drug resistant, and for this patient at 
the moment, the only therapeutic strategy that we  

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have is surgical intervention.
For most of this patient,  

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we need invasive procedure to record 
data to acquire electrophysiological data 

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By analyzing this data, we can 
localize the epileptogenic zone,  

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which is the main problem that we have today, 

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this takes long time, is very expensive, 
and this a strong subjective procedure.

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My most recent project was aimed at developing 
advanced novel method to create an automatic  

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tool able to detect the epileptogenic zone from 
very short fragment of data. The very first few  

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minutes of recording. To do this we work with 
novel methods that belongs to two big families:

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One is complex network analysis and the other 
is advanced machine learning and AI techniques. 

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Complex network, why? Because now is well known 
that epilepsy is a network disease and not only  

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epilepsy, but we know that our brain in 
general doesn't work with separated areas  

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involved specialized to do something. But most 
of the function require complex integration and  

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communication between these areas. And also 
pathology, like epilepsy, we know now that  

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is linked with alteration of this mechanism 
of communication between the whole brain.

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So we have several methods analyzing 
the synchronization between the areas  

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and also extracting more synthesized 
information like graph theory analysis  

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that allows to quantify the way all the 
areas are interconnected among each other.

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And then with machine learning techniques

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we can develop methods for recognition, 
automatic recognition, of those areas  

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that are responsible for seizure generation. So 
that needs to be removed from the other areas.

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we use these recordings and these patients to also 
analyze response, electrophysiological response,  

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to certain cognitive functions 
like memory or emotion perception 

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and we analyze with the same 
methods of signal processing,  

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complex network analysis, so behavior and 
communication between different regions,  

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to also understand better how our basic 
physiological cognitive functions.

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So not only the pathology but our 
normal physiological brain behavior.

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I think that neuroscience 
is the first modern science  

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that communicate and work with all humanities. 

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What we research as scientists is something 
that for centuries has been the research of  

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philosophers, artists, religions too.
So with our memory, our emotions,  

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our consciousness…and I think that is the most 
fascinating aspect that nowadays as scientist,  

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we can study. Because it’s huge, interested 
and it’s touched something deep of our being.