Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

VISAGES is the founding actor of an experimental research platform which was installed in August 2009 at the University Hospital of Rennes. The University of Rennes 1, Inria, Inserm for the academic side, and the University Hospital of Rennes and the Cancer Institute “Eugene Marquis“ for the clinical side, are partners of this neuroinformatics platform called Neurinfo (http://www.neurinfo.org ). This platform has been supported under the “Contrat de Projets Etat-Région” (C. Barillot is the PI) and has received a total amount of 4.01 M€  for the period 2007–2014. European (FEDER), National (through Ministry of research, Inria, Inserm and ANR) and local councils (Brittany Region, Ille et Vilaine, and Rennes Metropole) have joined their effort to support this operation for a total amount of 4010 k€ (600 k€ for the infrastructures, 2850 k€ for the equipments and 560 k€ for the functioning). This application was set up through the Regional PIMATGI initiative coordinated by INSERM in Brittany (C. Roux). The overall PIMATGI initiative served for the financing of three distinct, but complementary, platforms: Neurinfo, TheraFONC as a technical platform dedicated to therapy guided by functional imaging especially in the oncology domain (Inserm U 650 - LaTIM, Dir. Ch. Roux, Brest), and TherA-Image as a platform dedicated to image guided mini-invasive surgery and therapy especially in the domain of cardio-vascular diseases (U642 -LTSI, Dir. L. Senhadji, Rennes).

Concerning the Neurinfo Platform, the activity domain is a continuum between methodological and technological research built around specific clinical research projects. The ambition is to do innovation in science, technology and medical technology transfer for the implementation on the clinical field. On the medical field, the translational research domain mainly concerns medical imaging and more specifically the clinical neurosciences. Among them are multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diseases, surgical procedures of brain lesions, neuro-oncology and radiotherapy planning. Beyond these CNS applications, the platform is also open to alternative applications. Neurinfo ambitions to support the emergence of research projects based on their level of innovation, their pluri-disciplinarity and their ability to foster collaborations between different actors (public and private research entities, different medical specialties, different scientific profiles).

In this context, a new research 3T MRI system (Siemens Verio system) was acquired in summer 2009 in order to develop the clinical research in the domain of morphological, functional, structural and cellular in-vivo imaging. In 2014 a new equipment for simultaneous recording of EEG and MRI images has been acquired from Brain Product. In 2015, a mock scanner for experimental set-up has been acquired as well as a new High Performance Computing environment made of one large computing cluster and a data center that is shared and operated by the Inria center at IRISA (UMR CNRS 6074). The computation cluster (240 cores) and the data center (up to 50 TB) are dedicated to host and process imaging data produced by the Neurinfo platform, but also by other research partners that share their protocols on the Neurinfo neuroinformatics system (currently more than 30 sites).

Visages and its partners in the Neurinfo project are committed to use this new research platform for developing new regional, national and international collaborations around fundamental and applied clinical research projects dealing with in-vivo medical imaging.