Cerebral Blood Flow, Neurovascular Coupling, and Cortical Spreading Depression (13frg160)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Cerebral Blood Flow, Neurovascular Coupling, and Cortical Spreading Depression" workshop from June 9th to June 16th, 2013.

This workshop will bring together a group of researchers from the areas of mathematical modeling, biomedical
engineering, as well as experimentalists to address some of the fundamental issues related to cerebral blood
flow, neurovascular coupling, and cortical spreading depression (CSD). The main objective of the workshop is
to discuss and incorporate recent advances in experimental studies into mathematical models, which are based
on the fundamental laws of biochemistry and biophysics, that are capable of reproducing observed phenomenon
and to make predictions that can be verified by further experimental studies.

The modeling project in this workshop on CSD is of clinical importance because CSD has been implicated in
migraine with aura. Migraine, a neurological disorder, is characterized by mild to severe headaches, and
three times more common in women than in men. Furthermore, approximately a third of those people who have
migraine see an associated visual aura that precedes the migraine. This is a world-wide disease, and
affects more than 10% of the world's population and includes young and old. Therefore, this FRG Workshop
is suitable as a Mathematics of Planet Earth project, and falls under the general area of quantitative
studies of the medical arts.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).