Section: Application Domains

Understanding brain disorders

The approaches that we develop allow to characterize anatomical and functional alterations, thus making it possible to study these alterations in different clinical populations. This can provide provide new insights into the mechanisms and progression of brain diseases. This typically involves the acquisition of neuroimaging data in a group of patients with a given pathology and in a group of healthy controls. Measures of anatomical and functional alterations are then extracted in each subject (for instance using segmentation of anatomical structures, shape models or graph-theoretic measures of functional connectivity). Statistical analyses are then performed to identify: i) significant differences between groups, ii) correlations between anatomical/functional alterations on the one hand, and clinical, cognitive or biological measures on the other hand, iii) progression of alterations over time.

We propose to apply our methodologies to study the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases (mostly Alzheimer’s disease and fronto-temporal dementia), epilepsy, cerebrovascular pathologies and neurodevelopmental disorders (Gilles de la Tourette syndrome). In neurodegenerative diseases, we aim at establishing the progression of alterations, starting from the early and even asymptomatic phases. In Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, we study the atypical anatomical patterns that may contribute to the emergence of symptoms. In epilepsy, we aim at studying the relationships between the different functional and structural components of epileptogenic networks.