About the Workshop

Revolutionizing Healthcare: Bridging Brains and Technology: Join us for a groundbreaking workshop exploring the convergence of biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and computer science to create a new era of energy-efficient, high-performance medical devices and therapies.

Join an exciting group of biomedical engineers, neural engineers, neuroscientists (computational and physiologists), neuromorphic scientists and engineers, materials scientists, clinicians, and mainstream engineers (e.g., electrical engineers, optical engineers, computer engineers, device engineers) to introduce new brain- and biology-inspired design principles to engineers who are currently investigating non-von Neumann architectures. We expect that these new principles will provide alternative methods to solve relevant problems in the biomedical field, and to do so with significant improvements in the various metrics of the field.
 

Workshop Overview

The goal of the workshop is to bring communities together to create a new generation of biomedical and neuroengineering technologies that operate with extreme energy and data efficiency, adaptability, and performance advantages compared to current approaches.

We plan to congregate biomedical engineers, neural engineers, neuroscientists (computational and physiologists), neuromorphic scientists and engineers, materials scientists, clinicians, and mainstream engineers (e.g., electrical engineers, optical engineers, computer engineers, device engineers) to introduce new brain- and biology-inspired design principles to engineers who are currently investigating non-von Neumann architectures. We expect that these new principles will provide alternative methods to solve relevant problems in the biomedical field, and to do so with significant improvements in the various metrics of the field.
 

Intellectual Merit

The planned interactions will leverage the synergistic interests of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) [including the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)] and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve healthcare technologies, while also discovering fundamental concepts in engineering.

An expected output of the workshop will be a neuromorphic biotechnology roadmap that articulates the benefits of the approach, highlights the challenges and proposes a potential pathway to achieve the benefits. We expect analysis of the needs of the field, presentation of emerging technologies and concepts, and their potential impact on the common interests of the NIH and NSF. The workshop will primarily feature discussion and debates that will lead to a roadmap to clearly identify the near-term and longer-term opportunities and elucidate the potential partners – including the private sector – who should participate in driving these efforts.

Broader Impacts

The two-day workshop program will include 2 keynote addresses, 12 invited presentations, poster sessions for graduate student attendees, moderated discussion sessions and meetings with NIH and NSF program managers. We will also invite the program committee, composed of 5 experts, to serve on discussion panels. A further group of 6 scholars/entrepreneur/innovator will be convened for this workshop. We will encourage all of them to bring their students to participate in the discourse and present posters.

We will stage the workshop to coincide with Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference that will take place in Baltimore in October 2024. We expect both in-person and virtual participants. The invited speakers will be asked to address five questions that will lead to Needs, Challenge, Contribution, Impact and Investment Statements for the field. The output of the workshop will be a curated document that presents a roadmap for how neuromorphic engineering can contribute to biomedical technologies, enhance current approaches, promote scientific and engineering discoveries and offer entrepreneurial opportunities for the future.
 

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