GOSH BRC Junior Faculty Conference and Training Support Fund - Mathilde Ripart

Current Position: PhD student

Event/conference: IEC 2021 – 34th International Epilepsy Congress

Presenting: PhD results

Date: 28th August - 1st September 2021

Funding requested: £110

What did you present at the conference (including the title)?

I attended the IEC 2021- 34th International Epilepsy Congress and presented a poster called “MELD project: Quantitative analysis of associations between MRI features and FCD histopathologies”.

What were the main benefits/learnings from the conference?

The IEC 2021 congress proposed a wide range of talks about epilepsy disease: What is epilepsy, how epilepsy is classify in different subtypes, what are the different treatments, what are the latest method to detect epilepsy focus, what are the current clinical protocols and how they can be improved, etc. In addition, the IEC congress proposed very useful clinical sessions. During these sessions, they analyse real patient’s case interactively, to introduce how epilepsy is diagnosed, to discuss which parameters influence the decision about the best treatment to give, and how outcomes are monitors after treatments. Moreover, the IEC congress presented a very broad and wide selection of posters about neuroimaging, paediatric epilepsy, adult epilepsy, basic sciences, etc.

How did attending the conference benefit your career development?

Attending the conference provided me with strong knowledge about the epilepsy disease and the cutting-edge methods to automate the detection of the epilepsy focus. These new skills are essential to excel in my current research project, which is to develop an automated detection of pathology in drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Also, it gave me the opportunity to learn more about the current standard clinical protocols and how my research could benefit this field.

Did you learn any tips or best practice about how to make the most of virtual attendance at a conference?

Virtual attendance enables to re-watch sessions/presentation that you might have missed and read more posters than you could do when attending in person.