Dr. Dogris on the Next Chapter of Neurofield Neurotherapy

Your brain doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, so we’re trying to help write one using measurement, pattern recognition, and a lot of real-world clinical data. Dr. Heather Putney sits down with neurostimulation pioneer Dr. Nick Dogris to unpack where Neurofield is headed and why the next era of neurotherapy may look a lot more quantified, personalized, and transparent.

We talk through the full workflow: measuring the brain with EEG, analyzing what the data shows, matching brain findings to symptoms, and then generating a protocol that fits the person in front of you. Nick explains the big challenge clinicians face, “what do you give for what?”, especially when you’re trying to help people dealing with anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, concussion and traumatic brain injury, dementia-related disorders, or substance use issues. The conversation gets specific about the system Neurofield Neurotherapy is building: a cloud-based, de-identified repository that already includes 5,000+ people and 6,500+ records, with hundreds of new uploads each week, creating higher “resolution” for AI-driven matching and classifier discovery.

We also dig into what comes next: AI-assisted comparison analysis that can describe what changes after a protocol is run, helping clinicians see what shifted and potentially rate protocols by effectiveness over time. Finally, we cover who this can help across age ranges, plus a teaser on future non-invasive hardware aimed at pushing mental health and addiction treatment forward.

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To learn more about Dr. Nicholas Dogris with NeuroField Neurotherapy, Inc. visit: https://www.neurofieldneurotherapy.com/nicholas-dogris

To learn more about Transformative Neurotherapy visit:
https://www.TransformativeNeurotherapy.org
Transformative Neurotherapy
570 Lincoln Ave. 
Bellevue, PA 15202 
412-204-7397  

Transcript

Welcome To Transformative Neurotherapy

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Transformative Neurotherapy Podcast with your host, Dr. Heather Putney, founder and executive director of Transformative Neurotherapy. This is the place where healing happens faster. Because let's face it, your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual until now. Here we take a holistic approach to brain health, bringing together science, mind-body harmony, and the tools you need to optimize your well-being. Whether you're a high performer, executive, athlete, longevity hacker, or just someone tired of your brain working against you, Dr. Putney is here to help you unlock your full potential. From brain fog to chronic stress, we're covering it all. So you can finally experience brain health, mind harmony, and total well-being. Ready to get on stuck? Let's get started.

The Vision For Neurostimulation

SPEAKER_01 1:02

But its future holds even more promise. Today we're exploring where the company is headed and how it plans to shape the next era of neurotherapy innov innovation. Welcome everyone. I'm Dr. Heather Putney, founder and executive director of transformative neurotherapy. Back in the studio with Dr. Nick Dougras, a pioneer and maverick in the field of neurostimulation. We're super grateful to have you here. And our last session, we kind of we did a much bigger intro. So if you're curious to hear a little bit more about the background of Dr. Dougris, please listen to our previous episode. But we're just gonna jump right in and um uh kind of find out what do you have on the the books? What's the what's the vision for the future of the field of neurostimulation?

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Thank you for having me. Uh that's a great question. Um you know, in in your intro, you talk about your your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual. And uh, you know, uh I'd like to think that we're actually helping to to write that, to write that manual. Um, or or to help us to better understand what that manual is all about. Um so where are we going? Uh, you know, for 18 years now we've been building uh software and devices and and and uh a modality to help to rehabilitate and and um uh you know treat the human brain. And it turns out that now um we're actually at the place where we've come full circle. Neurofield um is uh is an ecosystem uh from top to bottom. Uh we we measure the organ that we're gonna treat, we measure your brain, and then we analyze that data and we take a really deep look uh uh uh at what that brain is doing. And then we match those symptoms to you, match your brain information to your symptoms. And then we say, oh, okay, well, it's you know, it's doing this, and this is what you say is going on. And then we have to generate a protocol and figure out how we're gonna use you know, cranial stimulation and all these energetic techniques that we have to help to rehabilitate you. And the biggest question over the years with almost every neurofield practitioner is what do you give for what? You know, because there's so many ways of addressing the brain for different varied conditions, depression, anxiety, ADHD, traumatic brain injury, opioid dependence, alcohol dependence, PTSD. I mean, you name it, the list goes way, way, way, way on. And at the end of the day, all those labels point at the brain. Right? And we said, wow, okay, we we need a way to uh address this that's more comprehensive. Now, in the neurofield system, I think I've written well over 500 protocols in that system and just for varied things in the brain. And so there's that many options. That's a lot of choices to make as a practitioner to have to choose one. And so then I said, you know what, there's got to be a better way to do this. And so I decided a couple of years ago to build a repository uh where we could put uh this brain information into uh a place where we could start to automate it and look at it in a different way. And so I built a c a cloud-based repository where um when you measure the brain, that data goes, redacts the personal information and it flies this neurological information to the cloud. And based on your diagnosis, it puts it in a certain bucket. Well, these buckets started to get filled over time, and once we got enough information in each bucket, we started to use AI uh to start to look at, you know, what are those buckets and what do they look like? What are the, you know, how are they different from each other? Are there specific mar mar markers or or biomarkers in those buckets that would help us to identify depression or anxiety or something like that?

How Big Data Improves Matching

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Dr. Dougris, can I just uh insert a quick question? I think it's maybe the researcher in me or the scientist in me myself. I'm really curious to know like uh about how many um profiles or how many scans do you have in this repository that you're that you're now utilizing uh for this for this use.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

So um right now we have um five about five, it's it's a little over five thousand people in the repository with well over six thousand five hundred records. So um, yeah, and and we have to run, we're getting, you know, all the neurofield practitioners have access to this repository. And so we're getting several hundred uploads per week now. And the more people we get in it, uh the the the higher the resolution. It's kind of like watching a black and white TV versus an 8K TV. You know, now we're getting our resolution's getting really, really granular and fine-tuned. And it's to the point now where we've been able to identify specific classifiers so we can match you to different people in different diagnostic categories like developmental disorders like autism or ADHD, or degenerative disorders like uh dementia or Alzheimer's disorder, um, PTSD, post-traumatic stress, you know, uh stress disorder, um uh what else? Uh anxiety, depression, uh, traumatic brain injury, concussion, substance abuse like alcohol or opioid addiction, personality disorders. There's all there's a number of different buckets that we have now. And when we fly the data up there, we do this really cool matching that matches your data to the bucket. And the one that's significant statistically, then we go, oh, that's a match. How is it a match? And then we start looking. We we take the brain and we create a three-dimensional image of it, and we figure out what parts of the brain are the match. And then we say, What does that part of the brain do? And we say, Oh, does it match your symptoms? And if it's a yes, and we keep on hitting a yes all the way through, then what we do is we give AI, I wrote a number of protocols. I took my protocols and I put them in a big, big document that we give to AI. And the AI now has, we say, Oh, you're a neurofilm practitioner. We want you to take this data that we have, this matching data, and we want you to pick a protocol from this AI repository that we created, and I want you to put it in a document and make a suggestion to the practitioner. And again, it's it's not the doctor, it's just making a match and a suggestion. So it's really cool because now the AI can do things that frankly I cannot. It can hyper-quantify the data and it can look at it in a way that we haven't been able to look at before. So, where are we going? We're going to the next level of quantified EEG using AI-driven data technology that can make predictions, that can make suggestions, and that can make comparisons and tell us what the comparisons are.

Comparing Before And After Changes

SPEAKER_02 8:15

Which is my future project here that's going to be out probably in the next month, is the uh comparison analysis that's AI driven. So now we have, now we have you, we can take your data, we can put it up there, we can generate a protocol and give it back to you, and you go, oh, okay, that's great. And then you could use it in clinical practice, make some alterations to it, if you will, run it, and then run another analysis, and then we can do this comparison to see what changed. And now we're using AI to actually write the language and the vernacular around what changed. So it's really cool because now we have we're we're we're kind of rolling the rock uphill here. And we're getting it to the point where uh we can start to see more, you know, what the changes are, how they changed, what protocol caused the change, and then actually be able to start to rate these protocols with different weights, if you will, that will allow us to know, well, this one's really effective for this, this one's really effective for that. And and then start to inform the users about, you know, this process and and and you know the score of each protocol. And so, you know, now it's more of a rating system where we can we can have more validity and reliability methods behind the protocols that have been written and and more data to say, wow, this one works about 80% of the time. Yeah. So that's that's the that's the mission now. And um, you know, that's from a software perspective, which we continue to to grow. And then

Hardware Teaser And Safety Claims

SPEAKER_02 9:51

from a hardware perspective, I have a couple of new ideas that um I'm uh I've put into uh the hopper with my engineers. And this next idea is uh one I I can't publicly talk about it yet, but uh it is um gonna take a couple of years to do. Um but it it expands uh just as a teaser, it expands all the ideas that we've been working on and uh in a way that is gonna um uh really I think push the field forward and you know create another level of um uh mental health and substance abuse treatment that has not been available. Otherwise, you know, people, you know, they have certain um tools at their disposal that they can use, certain modalities that are available to them. But this is something that um uh is non-invasive, uh it's uh um it's safe, it's effective. The software is going to uh continue to evolve and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna keep on rolling it forward here. Um yeah, it's so I'm I'm really excited about where we're going with it and and what's gonna happen.

Who Neurotherapy Can Help

SPEAKER_01 11:02

That's really exciting. And as you talk about this repository and all these scans that you've created uh and and all these kind of the way you're guiding the treatment, I'm just curious of what age ranges um can you work with? Like is this valid for kids as well as adults? Like, can you help give me a little bit of idea of like who this is going to help as far as clinically?

SPEAKER_02 11:22

Yeah, yeah. Uh it's from the very young. Uh you can go down to infant level all the way up to the very old. Um our normative database right now um generates what's called Z-scores from eight to eighty years of of age. And so eight to eighty. Um, but you know, we do have percentile data for um beyond those ranges. So infants uh all the way down to I think all the way down to like one and a half are in the repository. Yeah. So we have some really young pediatric EEGs in there and some very, very old uh EEGs in there as well. So yeah, a lot of brains.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Wow, that's really exciting. I I just the work that you're doing is just really incredible. And I just I could just see the wheel spinning right there as far as where you're going next. So I can't wait to, you know, maybe six months from now or so have you back and just see how far you've come by then because this is um you it's like you're on a treadmill. I mean this you're moving this needle really fast in this field.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

Thank you. Yeah, it it goes fast. It goes fast. We I think, yeah, it's been the I think the biggest boon and the biggest criticism of my career because, you know, we do things that are really rapid. And um when people step away from our little ecosystem and then come back to revisit to see what we're up to, we're in a different galaxy. And they're like, oh my God, you're you're doing that now. I'm like, yeah, we don't stop. We don't look back. It's it's one of our modos. Brad, Brad and I said that years ago. We don't look back, we just keep on looking forward.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Well, that's really exciting. Well, I can't wait to see where Neurofield is and you know, like in the future, but it's super exciting to see all that you've created um, you know, for all of us out here. And um just thank you so much for your time today, and I hope to see you again in the future.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Thank you. Be glad to come back sometime.

Closing Thoughts And Consultation Offer

SPEAKER_00 13:15

You've been listening to the Transformative Neurotherapy Podcast with Dr. Heather Putney. Remember, your brain isn't supposed to hold you back, it's supposed to power you forward. So stop letting it crash your party and start letting it do its job. If you're ready to optimize brain health, sharpen your focus, and age like a fine wine, schedule your free consultation today at transformative neurotherapy.org. Or call us at 412-204-7397. Because here, healing happens faster. See you next time.