Pet Project: Using AI to forecast and prevent epileptic seizures

If you're in California and see a dog outfitted in a snazzy vest with an electronic tablet, Spot, Fido or Lassie just might be participating in a Mayo Clinic epilepsy trial. Mayo Clinic and Medtronic are developing a next-generation epilepsy therapeutics platform that integrates brain implants with local and distributing computing environments to continuously chronicle brain activity and deliver electrical brain stimulation guided by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. This research is part of the National Institutes of Health's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which aims to revolutionize understanding of the human brain. Mayo Clinic has partnered with Medtronic, the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Davis, to create this epilepsy-management platform. The research is focused on drug-resistant epilepsy and has been studied in dogs with naturally occurring epilepsy in a laboratory kennel setting for several years.