Section: Overall Objectives

Overall objectives

Medical Imaging, Neuroinformatics, Neuroimaging, Medical Image Computing, Modeling of normal and pathological behavior of the human brain, e-health & HealthGrids

The Unit/Project VisAGeS U746 is a research team jointly affiliated to INSERM (National Institute of Health and Scientific Research), Inria (National Institute of Research in Computer Sciences and Automation) and IRISA / UMR CNRS 6074, University of Rennes I. We are located in Rennes, France on both medical and sciences campus. The team has been created in 2006. Our ambition is to set up a multidisciplinary team merging researchers in basic science and medical doctors. The goal of VisAGeS is to constitute a multidisciplinary team. Even though, research in medical imaging could find motivation and recognition based on methodological breakthroughs alone, the ultimate goal, when dealing with medical imaging research, is to make the clinical practice benefit from the basic and applied research, while keeping the excellence of the methodological research. This objective entails the creation of teams encompassing clinical and scientific researchers to design and conduct research projects together. Our aim through the past period was to build a research team able to perform a research going from a novel and basic stage to original clinical experimentation with clear medical impact.

Our research activities are focused on the research and development of new algorithms in medical imaging in the context of the pathologies of the central nervous system. In this context, we are addressing the general problems of the better understanding of normal and pathological brain organs and systems behaviour, at different scales, and the promotion and the support of Virtual Organizations of biomedical actors by means of healthgrid's technologies. The medical application objectives are focused on pathologies of the central nervous system, with a particular effort on extraction of new imaging biomarkers for brain pathologies (e.g. Multiple Sclerosis, neuropaediatrics, strokes, psychiatry, …). More generally, our application objectives concern the following diseases: Multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, dementia, neuro-degenerative brain diseases, brain vascular diseases.