Scientific Programme
Programme-at-a-Glance
Pre- and Post-Congress Workshops
 
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Having a congress like this allows us to meet with different professions and interact around common topics and interests.
It was very helpful for me to understand the challenges faced by my colleagues from other professions and disciplines. This gives us an opportunity to take a step back from clinical practice
and to interact, to be updated,
to reconnect and network.
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~ Prof Julian Thumboo
Director, SingHealth Health Services Research Centre
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Programme >
Neuroscience Symposium
Tomorrow’s Neuroscience Today – Integrating Vision, Education and Clinical Research
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Track type: Symposium |
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Duration: 90 minutes |
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Location: Academia, Level 1, L1-S1 |
Topic 1:
Innovative Technologies in Neurotrauma
 Speaker: Dr Jai Prashanth Rao
This presentation will review emerging and translational technologies that are applicable in the management of brain injury specific to neurotrauma. We will consider technologies and their usefulness with regards to the pillars of academic medicine – clinical, education and research. At the end of the presentation, participants should be aware of the leading frontiers in the field of neurotrauma.
Topic 2:
New Frontiers in Young-onset Dementia
Speaker: Dr Adeline Ng
Young-onset dementia (YOD), defined as dementia symptoms occurring before the age of 65, is increasingly being recognised as a major cause of morbidity worldwide. Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and vascular dementia remain the most common aetiologies for YOD. Notably, the profile of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease (EOAD) remains significantly different from that of typical late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, with different clinical phenotypes, more rapid progression and poorer response to pharmacological treatment. FTD may present with change in behaviour and personality in the behavioural variant (bvFTD), or with decline in language in the language variants of FTD (semantic variant primary progressive aphasia and non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia). Treatment options are limited for this under-recognised disease, which remains the second most common cause of YOD in many cohorts. In this presentation, we summarise key clinical questions pertaining to EOAD and FTD, and highlight new advances in research into the unique pathophysiological aspects of both diseases, and their implications for future therapeutic strategies.
Topic 3:
Alternations in Brain Network Dynamics in Early Stage and Pre-clinical Dementia
Speaker: Dr Helen Zhou
Neurodegenerative diseases target large-scale neural networks. Emerging network-sensitive neuroimaging techniques have allowed researchers to demonstrate that the spatial patterning of each disease relates closely to a distinct functional intrinsic connectivity network (ICN), mapped in the healthy brain with task-free or “resting-state” functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our previous work on task-free fMRI suggested that early stage behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease featured divergent functional changes within the two major networks (the default mode network and the salience network), consistent with known reciprocal network interactions and the opposite symptom-deficit profiles of the two disorders.
Collectively, these findings raise mechanistic questions about why each disease adopts a network-related spatial pattern and whether these patterns could be detected in pre-clinical stage of the disease. In this presentation, our recent work on alternations in brain network dynamics in subjects at-risk for dementia, subjects with mild cognitive impairment and dementia will be described. Further developed and tested in longitudinal dataset, brain signatures from multimodal neuroimaging data may provide simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive biomarkers for differential diagnosis, disease monitoring, behaviour prediction, and treatment planning in neurodegenerative diseases.
Topic 4:
What Makes an Effective Mentor and an Effective Mentee?
Speaker: Prof Janet Hafler
Mentoring is a key teaching skill that is considered to be a core component of the duties of all faculty. Effective mentoring requires understanding the needs of the mentee. How do we learn to be an effective mentor? How do we learn to be an effective mentee? As Daloz (1986) said, “I resolved to look more closely at what good teachers and mentors actually do as they guide their charges along on their transformational journeys.” In this session I will explore what good mentors and good mentees can do toward achieving successful outcomes and address specific characteristics of effective mentors. This session will be of interest to mentors and mentees in research and clinical areas.
*Information is correct at time of update
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