Section: New Results

Research axis 3: Management of Information in Neuroimaging

Participants : Élise Bannier, Christian Barillot, Yao Chi, Isabelle Corouge, Olivier Commowick, Inès Fakhfakh, Michael Kain, Florent Leray, Julien Louis, Aneta Morawin, Mathieu Simon, Arnaud Touboulic.

The major topic that has been reached in the period concerns the sharing of data and processing tools in neuroimaging (through the ANR Neurolog and VIP projects, and more recently the “Programme d’Investissement d’Avenir” project such as OFSEP and FLI-IAM) that led to build a suitable architecture to share images and processing tools). Our overall goal within these projects was to set up a computational infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of neuroimaging data, as well as image processing tools, in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. These consortiums gathered expertises coming from several complementary domains: image processing in neuroimaging, workflows and grid computing, ontology development and ontology-based mediation. Shanoir (SHAring NeurOImaging Resources) is one of the major outcome of these projects. Shanoir uses semantics for concepts organization that are defined by the OntoNeuroLOG ontology. OntoNeuroLOG reuses and extends the OntoNeuroBase ontology. Both were designed using the same methodological framework, based on the use of the foundational ontology DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering), and the use of a number of core ontologies, that provide generic, basic and minimal concepts and relations in specific domains such as Artefacts. Shanoir aims at establishing the conditions allowing, through the Internet, to share distributed information sources in neuroimaging, whether these sources are located in various centers of experimentation, clinical departments of neurology, or research centers in cognitive neurosciences or image processing. This enables a large variety of users to diffuse, exchange or reach neuroimaging information with appropriate access means, in order to be able to retrieve information almost as easily as if the data were stored locally by means of the “cloud computing” Storage as a Service (SaaS) concept. The Shanoir environment has been succesfully deployed to the Neurinfo platform were it is routinely used to manage images of the research studies. It is also currently being deployed for two large projets: OFSEP (“Observatoire Français de la Sclérose en Plaques”) where up to 30000 patients will be acquired on a ten years frame, and the Image Analysis and Management (IAM) node of the France Life Imaging national infrastructure (FLI-IAM). Our team VisAGeS fulfills multiple roles in this nation-wide FLI project. Christian Barillot is the chair of the IAM node, Olivier Commowick is participating in the working group workflow and image processing and Michael Kain is the technical manager of the node. Apart from the team members, software solutions like MedInria and Shanoir are part of the final infrastructure software solutions.