Until he stepped into an operating room for the first time, Aaron Batista thought he knew a lot about the brain.
"Imagine spending your entire life snorkeling, and then suddenly you go scuba diving," Batista said. "You'll quickly realize you were only scratching the surface of a deeper reality."
For Batista, a neural engineer with decades of research exploring brain-computer interfaces at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, that realization stemmed from his earliest visits to Dr. Jorge Gonzalez-Martinez’s operating room, which became the foundation for a novel postdoctoral training program: Neural Engineering in Neurosurgery: Bridging Engineering to Clinical Practice.
“Engineers tend to think about the brain by thinking about computational circuitry that underlies behavior, while surgeons are thinking about how they can treat individuals who are suffering today,” Batista said. “And despite the fact that our engineering laboratories sit just an eight-minute walk from the neurosurgery operating rooms, it’s a distance that we’ve rarely covered, until now.”
Supported by a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) T32 award (1T32NS147937-01), the program will connect postdoctoral fellows from the Swanson School of Engineering's Department of Bioengineering, residents from the School of Medicine's Department of Neurological Surgery, and 32 affiliated faculty members and clinicians to work on research projects that improve neurosurgical practice.
“This program is a perfect example of how Pitt's strengths across professional disciplines promotes the creation of interprofessional teams.” said Paul Wallach, vice chancellor for health sciences education and executive vice dean for academic affairs at the School of Medicine. “These teams then serve as drivers of innovation in clinical care."
Teaming Up to Improve Neurosurgical Practice
Co-directed by Batista, professor of bioengineering at the Swanson School, and Jorge González-Martínez, professor and vice-chair of neurological surgery at the School of Medicine, the program will bring together eight trainees, including four postdoctoral associates and four residents, who will work side by side on team-based research projects.
“Postdocs will shadow neurosurgeons in the operating room, and residents will pursue a deep dive into laboratory research under the direct supervision of their engineering mentor,” Batista said. “That way, our trainees will get to work on a project that actually matters for doctors.”
Designed to close the gap separating neurosurgery and bioengineering, each pair will be matched to one of eight collaboration clusters built around surgical areas where bioengineering and clinical strengths already overlap: epilepsy, stroke, speech and language mapping, sensory restoration, pain, trauma, movement disorders, and brain tumors.
“I’m excited about partnering with engineers to build a better understanding of the mechanisms related to epilepsy," González-Martínez said. “And, we can use this program to better understand how the signals we see in our micro-electrode recordings interact with behavior, not only for epilepsy, but also for language and movement disorders."
Several ongoing collaborations at the University provided the groundwork for the type of research that the program hopes to accelerate. Among them, work by González-Martínez and School of Medicine collaborator Elvira Pirondini uses stimulation in the thalamus, a central coordinator for the brain’s cerebral cortex, to help restore speech and motor function in patients recovering from stroke.
Other projects include helping surgeons better decide how much tissue is safe to remove during tumor resection, developing new spinal cord stimulation approaches for chronic pain, and building next-generation implantable sensors and closed-loop neuromodulation systems for movement and emotional disorders.
"As doctors, we typically stay in the OR, so we don't have many chances to interact with engineers," González-Martínez said. "We know the challenges and the gaps we need to work on, but we don't always know how to answer those challenges.”
Trainees will also complete a yearlong course, BIOENG 2805: Translational Neural Engineering, to explore the current landscape of neural engineering and identify paths for innovation. Both Batista and González-Martínez hope the program will end up doing far more than just train individual researchers — they see it as a first step toward building a lasting, formal bridge between engineering and medicine at the University.
"This is a very unique opportunity to finally create an educational environment that combines neural engineering and neurosurgery," González-Martínez said. "We’ve never had something like this, and it’s just the first step to creating a larger integration between bioengineering and neurosurgery.”