Meeting Description

Revolutions in imaging techniques have occurred at multiple length scales, offering a wide range of new modalities to probe living tissue and thus opening new perspectives for the understanding of every aspects of pain-related mechanisms, from unraveling how ion channels transduce information into nerve signals, to monitoring molecular interactions, deciphering connectivity and network interactions along pain pathways, identifying functional elements of pain perception and assessing structural, neurochemical and functional alterations in both animal models and patient populations non-invasively.  While the array of subjects spans a very wide range, the development of these techniques all have in common that they put back structural biology into its functional context.  In addition, several of the techniques share common challenges, including signal extraction, processing and interpretation as well as real-time handling of very large data sets.  The objective of the workshop is therefore to bring together leading researchers from the academic and industrial sectors in each of these areas for in depth coverage of challenges and opportunities, allowing pain researchers interested in these new approaches to appreciate how they can be applied to specific research questions.  This area of research also offers enormous potentials for accelerating translation of basic research findings to clinical and therapeutic applications.  It is therefore expected that this symposium will be an excellent conduit for stimulating new collaborations among pain researchers.