Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

TransIRMf project

Participants : Christian Barillot, Jean-Yves Gauvrit, Jean-Christophe Ferré, Elise Bannier, Camille Maumet, Isabelle Corouge.

duration : 18 months, from 01/10/2010

The objective of this project is to set up and validate acquisition and data processing pipelines for metabolic and functional MRI. Acquition techniques comprise innovative block design and event related paradigms based on various stimuli (visual, auditive) and use various MRI sequences (BOLD, ASL). Paradigms were selected to cover a large scope of potential applications. The protocol imaging namely includes a BOLD fMRI resting state paradigm, an n-back working memory paradigm for BOLD fMRI, as well as and for the first time, for functional ASL. An emotional prosody recognition task was implemented, also for the first time, in an event related BOLD fRMI context. Data were acquired on 30 healthy subjects. Processing of these data is in progress based on inhouse pipelines (e.g., template construction using DARTEL, PVE correction for ASL data). This grant was awarded in collaboration with Biotrial within the CRITT-Santé Bretagne program.

CPER 2007-2013, NeurInfo Platform

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

duration : 7 years, from 01/01/2007

Visages is the founding actor of a new experimental research platform which has just been installed 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 concerns the in-vivo human imaging for clinical research and neuroinformatics especially in the context of CNS pathologies. A new research 3T MRI system has been acquired in summer 2009 in order to develop the clinical research in the domain of morphological, functional, structural and cellular in-vivo imaging. 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. In the next three years, additional equipments will arrive among them are two PET labs for experimentation of new ligands for molecular imaging, an in vivo confocal microscope for interventional imaging in neurosurgery and large computing facilites for storage and processing of large collection of data. This new platform has been supported under the “Contrat de Projets Etat-Région“ (C. Barillot is the PI) and have received a total amount of 5.1 Meuros for the period of 2007–2013. A specific technical staff to conduct this platform is under recruitment in order to make this new environment open to a large scientific and clinical community.

COREC projects

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

COREC is the "COmité de REcherche Clinique" of the University Hospital of Rennes. This comity proposes an annual project funding in the limit of 30keuros per project. In 2011, the Neurinfo platform as an incitative action for clinical research project emergence accompanied the COREC call by financially supporting the imaging part of the projects up to 50 MRI hours, ie 30keuros. Two projects were selected by the COREC in this context.

Emotional prosody recognition in fMRI and vulnerability to suicide

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

This project, initiated by the Psychiatry Department of the University Hospital of Rennes, is a clinical research study looking for correlations between cerebral activity observed with fMRI during an emotional prosody recognition task in a cohort of depressed patients and at risk for suicide. This study will include 3 groups of 20 patients : i) depressed patients with recent attempted suicide, ii) depressed with attempted suicide history, iii) depressed with no attempted suicide history. fMRI data will be acquired at the Neurinfo platform, their processing and interpretation will be performed in close collaboration between the Psychiatry Department and the VisAGeS team.

DIMITRI: Evaluation of the test object DIMITRI to measure diffusion restriction in full body MRI in bone infiltration

Participant : Elise Bannier.

Initiated by the Radiology Department of the University Hospital of Rennes, this clinical research study will evaluate the reproductibility of the diffusion restriction quantification methods. The experimental framework will rely on the test object DIMITRI and will consider inter-raters variability (fiability), intra-MRI sanner variability (repeatability) and inter-MRI scanners variability. Clinical applications of this work concern the use of diffusion restriction as a biomarker for myeloma diagnosis and follow-up.