Section: New Software and Platforms

The P-LOCUS software

Participants : Florence Forbes, Flor Vasseur.

Joint work with: Senan Doyle (start-up creator) and Michel Dojat.

The Locus software was extended to address the delineation of lesions in pathological brains. Its extension P-LOCUS (http://p-locus.com ) for lesion detection was realized by S. Doyle with financial support from GRAVIT (Grenoble Alpes Valorisation Innovation Technologies, http://www.gravit-innovation.org/ ) with the goal to create a Start-up. P-LOCUS software analyses, in few minutes, a 3D MR brain scan and performs fully automatic brain lesion delineation using a combined dataset of various 3D MRI sequences. Its originality comes from:

• it is fully automatic: no external user interaction and no training data required

• the possibility to combine information from several images (MR sequences)

• a statistical Bayesian framework for robustness to image artefacts and a priori knowledge incorporation

• a voxel-based clustering technique that uses Markov random fields (MRF) incorporating information about neighboring voxels for spatial consistency and robustness to imperfect image features (noise).

• the possibility to select and incorporate relevant a priori knowledge via different atlases, e.g. tissue and vascular territory atlases

• a fully integrated preprocessing steps and lesion ROI identification

P-LOCUS software was presented at various conferences and used for the BRATS Challenge on tumor segmentation organized as a satellite challenge of the Miccai conference in Nagoya, Japan. A paper published in IEEE trans. on Medical Imaging reports the challenge results [24] . Results are also shown in [47] . The software has been registered at APP in 2013 and is now undergoing industrial development for the creation of a start-up (Pixyl) expected in January 2015.