Advisory Board

Dr. Chi-Sang Poon

The ScienceDaily article Leveraging Learning For Artificial Respiration said

MIT researchers have found that the body’s innate ability to adapt to recurring stimuli could be leveraged to design more effective and less costly artificial respirators. The new approach could minimize the need for the induced sedation or paralysis currently necessary for some patients on mechanical ventilation.
 
Nonassociative learning, or our innate ability to adapt to recurring stimuli, is the focus of work to be described in PLoS One, Public Library of Science journal.
 
Specifically, Chi-Sang Poon, a research scientist at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and colleagues examined rats under mechanical ventilation to see how they applied different forms of nonassociative learning to adapt to the rhythm imposed by the respirator.

Chi-Sang Poon, Ph.D., FIEEE, FAIMBE is Principal Research Scientist, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. He is on the Editorial Board of Behavioral and Brain Functions. His main research area is in neurophysiology and neuroengineering. He has also made many contributions in signal processing, system biology, and social sciences.
 
Chi-Sang coedited Frontiers in Modeling and Control of Breathing: Integration at Molecular, Cellular, and Systems Levels, and coauthored The Limits of Reductionism in Medicine: Could Systems Biology Offer an Alternative?, Nonassociative learning as gated neural integrator and differentiator in stimulus-response pathways, A Hebbian covariance feedback learning paradigm for self-tuning optimal control, DNA Hypomethylation Perturbs the Function and Survival of CNS Neurons in Postnatal Animals, Titration of chaos with added noise, Field potential analysis of synaptic transmission in spiking neurons in a sparse and irregular neuronal structure in vitro, NMDA receptor activity in utero averts respiratory depression and anomalous long-term depression in newborn mice, and Decrease of cardiac chaos in congestive heart failure.
 
Chi-Sang earned his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Hong Kong in 1975, his M.Sc. in Bioelectronics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1977, and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering and systems science at UCLA in 1981. He was Visiting Scientist at Biologie Fonctionnelle du Neurone, C.N.R.S., France in 1994. He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
 
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