Congratulations to Mosbah! The Yi-Min Wang and Pi-Yu Chung Research Award is an annual award recognizing doctoral students in Electrical and Computer Engineering for excellence in research. Mosbah was one of two students receiving this award at the 2026 Student Awards and Recognition Banquet – Celebrating Success.
A new approach to spinal stimulation therapy under development at Carle Illinois College of Medicine could offer more effective relief for patients with chronic pain, especially those in rural areas. The innovative approach leverages real-time data on the patient’s emotional state as well as physical biomarkers to optimize pain relief through more personalized delivery of spinal stimulation.
For decades, spinal stimulation has been used to treat chronic pain. A small, implanted device delivers mild electrical impulses to the spine, disrupting pain signals by activating specific nerve fibers. Open-loop stimulators deliver a manually programmed level of electricity regardless of the patient’s unique characteristics. Closed-loop systems are more advanced, allowing for more personalized stimulation based on biomarkers detected in the patient.
CI MED student Prateek Dullur is part of a cross-disciplinary team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign working to improve on existing closed-loop technology. “Prior research has investigated closed-loop systems built on objective biomarkers (e.g., movement and position) or subjective ones (such as mood and pain levels). A personalized approach incorporating both modalities has not yet been developed. We believe this approach is the future of closed-loop algorithms,” Dullur said.
Specifically, the team is working with experts from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who specialize in advanced neural engineering and artificial intelligence. “Part of this work is inspired by seizure forecasting and closed-loop stimulation in epilepsy, which the DEPEND lab (headed by CI MED and Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Ravishankar Iyer) has validated in a collaboration with the Mayo Clinic. We believe applying a similar architecture to chronic pain and spinal cord stimulation could hold tremendous promise,” Dullur said.
“Ultimately, we aim to provide improved quality of life to patients with chronic pain that is refractory to medication or other treatment,” said Dullur, who presented the team’s work at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons Annual Meeting in Los Angeles in October. “By improving our models, we hope to contribute to the fundamental understanding of chronic pain. This work may take us one step closer towards providing better daily outcomes and lowering the chance of device failure due to tolerance, which is a major concern with existing devices,” he said.
The team is building its proposed computer model for a personalized closed-loop spinal stimulation system. They’re also expanding their work to explore the effectiveness of spinal stimulation for treating rural patients living with chronic pain.
“We are conducting a retrospective study with patients in the Carle Foundation Hospital network. We believe these joint efforts may lead to novel insights into treating chronic pain in under-resourced settings,” Dullur said.
In addition to Dullur, the research team includes: Dr. Suguna Pappu, a CI MED faculty member and Carle Health neurosurgeon; CI MED students Meenakshi Singhal, Mehreen Ali, Brian Hong, and Neema Darabi; from the U. of I. Department of Electrical Engineering Professor Ravishankar Iyer (CI MED professor of Biomedical and Translational Sciences) and graduate student Yurui Cao; and from the Department of Bioengineering, Professor Yuan Yang, an expert in neural engineering and neural modeling.
Available at: https://medicine.illinois.edu/news/ci-med-illinois-researchers-develop-personalized-spinal-stimulation-therapy-for-chronic-pain-sufferers
Archit Patke, Ph.D., a recent graduate from Prof. Iyer’s DEPEND Group, was named a 2025 Machine Learning Commons Rising Star for his groundbreaking work improving the performance and reliability of GPUs that power today’s AI systems. His research boosts efficiency by teaching machines to work smarter — not harder — while uncovering the causes of GPU failures in advanced hardware like NVIDIA’s A100 and H100. Already recognized by major tech companies and adopted in open-source platforms, Patke’s achievements highlight Illinois’ leadership in next-generation AI innovation.
Krishnakant Saboo is recognized as a Schmidt Science Fellows in 2023. The Schmidt Science Fellow program brings scientific disciplines together to create novel ways of thinking and develop creative solutions. Working with the scientific community, Schmidt Fellows help break down barriers to interdisciplinary science and accelerate positive impacts for global society. Saboo received the award for his interdisciplinary work in neuroscience and biomedical engineering. Schmidt Science Fellows is an initiative of Schmidt Sciences, delivered in partnership with the Rhodes Trust.
Prof Ravi Iyer receives the DSN Test of Time Paper Award in 2024. The Test-of-Time Award is given by the IEEE Computer Society TC on Dependable Computing. It recognizes g papers published 10 years ago at DSN, in the DSN proceedings (research track, practical experience report or tool papers), that have had a sustained and important impact on the theory and/or practice of dependable systems. Prof Iyer’s paper “Lessons learned from the analysis of system failures at petascale: The case of Blue Waters,” was published in 2014. C. Di Martino, Z. Kalbarczyk, R. K. Iyer, F. Baccanico, J. Fullop, W. Kramer, ” Lessons Learned from the Analysis of System Failures at Petascale: The Case of Blue Waters” IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Atlanta, USA 2014, doi: 10.1109/DSN.2014.62.