Publications
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PiN Faculty Member - Emery N. Brown, MD, PhD
Emery Brown, MD, PhD Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia Building 46-6079 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 Tel: 617-726-7487 Fax: 617-726-8410 Email: enb@neurostat.mit.edu Visit my lab page here. |
General anesthesia is a neurophysiological state in which a patient is rendered unconscious, insensitive to pain, amnestic, and immobile, while being maintained physiologically stable. General anesthesia has been administered in the US for more than 165 years and currently more than 100,000 people receive general anesthesia daily in this country for surgery alone. Still, the mechanism by which an anesthetic drug induces general anesthesia remains a medical mystery. We use a systems neuroscience approach to study how the state of general anesthesia is induced and maintained. To do so, we are using fMRI, EEG, neurophysiological recordings, microdialysis methods and mathematical modeling in interdisciplinary collaborations with investigators in HST, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston University. The long-term goal of this research is to establish a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia, safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs and to develop better neurophysiologically-based methods for measuring depth of anesthesia.
Last Update: 12/11/2018