Biogenouest

The VisAGeS team and the Neurinfo platform integrated the Biogenouest "Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique (GIS)" in 2012. Biogenouest is a Western France life science and environment core facility network. Research programmes are undertaken in the fields of Marine biology, Agriculture/Food-processing, Human health, and Bioinformatics. Set up in keeping with the inter-regional principle of complementarity, Biogenouest coordinates over twenty technological core facilities in both the Brittany and Pays de la Loire regions.

Projet Fondation de France: PERINE

Participants : Élise Bannier, Isabelle Corouge, Olivier Commowick, Jean-Christophe Ferré, Christian Barillot.

This study evaluates the effect of prenatal exposure to neurotoxicants on the developing brain. Following previous studies in the PELAGIE cohort this MRI study involves ASL, Diffusion and working memory as well as motor inhibition BOLD fMRI together with neuropsychological tests in children. Inclusions have started in November 2014 and lasted for 2 years. The MRI acquisitions of the PERINE projects have all been performed and 101 children included. A post-doc will start in April 2017 to process the diffusion MRI and ASL data of this project.

Fondation de l’Avenir - Stroke, rehabilitation and fMRI

Participants : Élise Bannier, Isabelle Bonan, Isabelle Corouge, Jean-Christophe Ferré, Christian Barillot, Jean-Yves Gauvrit.

duration: 12 months from November 2012. Project extended in 2015.

A complementary funding (20 000€) was obtained to support a new research project on rehabilitation of stroke patients. The fMRI tasks were setup and validated on healthy controls (paper ready for submission). The project was extended in 2014 to recruit more patients.

Projet Fondation de France: EPMR-MA

Participants : Pierre-Yves Jonin, Élise Bannier, Christian Barillot, Isabelle Corouge, Quentin Duché, Jean-Christophe Ferré.

This project evaluates memory effects in healthy adults and in patients presenting cognitive impairments using BOLD fMRI and diffusion MRI. A pilot study has been completed in 2015 in order to optimize the experimental design. The inclusions of patients started in 2016 and are ongoing. A Post Doc was recruited to work on fMRI and DTI processing.

Allocation d'Installation Scientifique – Rennes Métropole

Participant : Emmanuel Caruyer.

Diffusion MRI has been a tremendous tool for the diagnosis of a number of brain pathologies such as abnormal development, neuro-degenerative or inflammatory disorders or brain tumors. Typical resolution in diffusion MRI is about 2mm – this suggests that in white matter, any volume element may contain millions of axons. Although currently we can characterize molecular diffusion, recent developments in diffusion MRI have shown the possibility to quantify more specifically some physical tissue parameters in white matter, such as axonal density and diameter: this means that we can retrieve information from a much smaller scale than the typical imaging resolution.

Acquisition time for this kind of measurements remains long and largely incompatible with in vivo application in humans. This projects aims at developing novel signal processing and acquisition methods for the reconstruction of microstructural informations in a reasonable acquisition time. We will study how sparse representations can be applied to the diffusion signal, in order to enable microstructure information reconstruction. In conjunction with this, we will develop acquisition sequences adapted to these sparse represnetations, in order to reconstruct the diffusion signal from fewer measurements, using results from the compressive sensing theory.