Section: New Results

Management of Information and Semantic Processing

NeuroLOG project: Sharing of data and sharing of processing tools in neuroimaging

Participants : Bernard Gibaud, Bacem Wali.

The NeuroLOG project (ANR ANR-06-TLOG-024) came to its end in december 2010. However, we managed to maintain the NeuroLOG platform in operation, which is important with regards to publication. Several papers are in preparation. A lot of efforts were devoted in 2011 to submit a new proposal to ANR, building on NeuroLOG's achievements. A NeuroLOG2 project was submitted in March to the ANR TECSAN program (health technology). This new project aimed both at going on developing the technology for sharing data and processing tools, while being more involved in neuroimaging applications. Two application fields were proposed, concerning research on Alzheimer Desease, on the one hand, and epilepsy, on the other hand. The consortium was enlarged accordingly, with the integration of new partners such as the EDELWEISS project (INRIA, Sophia), the U642 LTSI (INSERM, Rennes) and U1028 CNRL (INSERM, Lyon). A new submission is envisaged in 2012, taking into account the recommendations of ANR.

Semantic annotation of anatomic images in neuroimaging

Participants : Bernard Gibaud, Tristan Moreau, Xavier Morandi.

This project aims at exploring the feasibility of relying on symbolic knowledge provided by ontologies to assist the annotation of anatomical images. The basic assumption underlying this work is that ontologies not only can provide a reference vocabulary to annotate images, but they can also provide useful prior knowledge that may help the annotation process itself, an assumption supported by the interesting results obtained by Ammar Mechouche in his PhD work. The current study, initiated in 2010 in the context of the Master student work of Elsa Magro (analysis of intra-precentral connections and of the U-fibers connecting the precentral and postcentral gyri) was pursued in 2011 (PhD work of Tristan Moreau). Our most recent works try to establish a parcellation of the grey-matter white matter surface based on the connectivity profiles of individual points of this surface, valid for a population of subjects. This is a prerequisite before identifying the more salient fiber bundles to be modelled in our ontology.

Semantic annotation of models and simulated medical images

Participants : Bernard Gibaud, Germain Forestier.

This project is carried out in the context of the Virtual Imaging Platform (VIP) project, an ANR project aiming at setting up a platform for facilitating the use of image simulation software in medical imaging, and coordinated by Creatis (Lyon). The platform will integrate simulation software to generate image of different modalities (i.e. MR, CT, PET, US). In this project, VISAGES is in charge of coordinating the development of an application ontology to support the annotation of the data shared in this platform (simulated images, anatomical models and physiological models used in simulations), as well as the annotation of simulation software components, in order to facilitate their interoperation within the platform. The work completed in 2011 is a continuation of what was started in 2010. Our major result in 2011 is an ontology allowing to annotate the models used for medical image simulations. Actually models are composed of files containing images (3D voxel maps) or surfaces (meshes). Our ontology includes entities called model layers associated with those files and depicting the model contents in terms of : anatomical structures, pathological structures, foreign bodies, contrast agents etc. Each individual object present in the model is referred to by an object layer part to which physical parameter distributions can be associated, that are used by simulation software. The ontology was modelled as OntoSpec documents (a methodology defined by Gilles Kassel in Amiens), then implemented in OWL. A preliminary version of this model was presented at a workshop organized by EBI in Cambridge in March 2011 (in the context of the VPH/RICORDO project). A more complete version was presented at the CBMS'2011 Conference in Bristol. VIP is a collaborative project, supported by ANR (Agence National de la Recherche), through grant ANR-AA-PPPP-000. The partners with whom we have the tightest relations are: Creatis (Lyon), I3S (Sophia), CEA-LETI (Grenoble).