Cerebral Autoregulation SIG          

The SIG on Cerebral Autoregulation will act to promote research into and education in cerebral autoregulation within ISCBFM, in collaboration with the Cerebral Autoregulation Research Network (CARNet). CARNet (www.car-net.org) is an international group of over 140 researchers that was founded in 2011 at its inaugural meeting in London. It has subsequently held an annual meeting each year, with the 8^th meeting scheduled to take place in Oxford in June 2018 (the 7^th meeting was held in conjunction with the Brain 17 meeting in Berlin). A number of collaborative research projects have also taken place with consensus papers being published and analysis tools and other resources being made freely available through the website. The SIG will build on this work, integrating this community fully into ISCBFM and thus promoting cerebral autoregulation more widely with the broader community.
 

Mission: 
The mission of the SIG on Cerebral Autoregulation is to promote research and education in all aspects of cerebral autoregulation, by encouraging collaboration between physiologists, physicists, engineers and clinicians, in order to advance both our fundamental understanding of cerebral autoregulation and to develop new clinical applications across a wide range of cerebrovascular disease.

Cerebral Autoregulation SIG Chair:
Stephen Payne      [email protected]


Planned Activities:
The SIG will be involved in the following meetings that are already confirmed or planned:

• 8^th International Conference on Cerebral Autoregulation (Oxford, 18^th-19^th June 2018): This meeting will host around 60-80 researchers in this area; we have applied for sponsorship from ISCBFM.
• Royal Society meeting on ‘Integrated Control of Cerebral Blood Flow’ (London, 3^rd-4^th December 2018): This meeting will provide an important way to gather together researchers in the wider community of CBF control (it is being organised by Stephen Payne, with Clare Howarth, Daniel Bulte and Shieak Tzeng as co-organisers). If successful, this could lead to a regular meeting on this topic (potentially interleaving in even years with the Brain meetings).
• Proposed symposium on ‘Clinical Applications of Cerebral Autoregulation’ (Brain 19 meeting, Japan, July 2019): This symposium (proposal submitted) aims to highlight cerebral autoregulation within ISCBFM and to provide a launch for members to sign up and to become involved in the SIG. We would intend to propose a symposium at subsequent Brain meetings.
• Joint ICP-CARNet meeting (Leuven, September 2019): This meeting will maintain our links with the ICP community (we held a joint meeting with them in 2016).

We are considering organising a first 2-day summer school for graduate students and post-docs in conjunction with this last meeting as a ‘primer' course in cerebral autoregulation. Of course, were ISCBFM to be interested in this idea more widely, it would be possible to envision this becoming a broader, larger event, covering more of the field of ISCBFM, that could become stand-alone in the medium term.

The SIG will also help to co-ordinate other activities that are currently run through CARNet, including:

• Collaborative research projects: We have carried out a number of these in the past, with one multi-author publication already[1] and two further such publications in process. We plan to continue this through our yearly meetings, with an extra day being set aside in future meetings for this.
• Website tools: We already have tools that are available on the CARNet website[2] and plan to expand this.

We would also plan to help to launch the SIG by proposing a special issue of JCBFM on Cerebral Autoregulation (Editorial Board member Jurgen Claassen has indicated his strong enthusiasm to be involved with the SIG in this and other ways).



How to Join:
If you want to become involved with the Cerebral Autoregulation SIG click the link below. Your participation is welcome!