Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams Not Involved in an Inria International Labs

BARBANT

• Title: Boston and Rennes, a Brain image Analysis Team

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Harvard University (United States) - Mathematics Department - Simon K. Warfield

• Start year: 2015

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/barbant/

• BARBANT is an Inria associate team shared between Inria VisAGeS research team and the Computational Radiology Laboratory at the Boston Children’s hospital (Harvard Medical School). This associate team aims at better understanding the behavior of normal and pathological Central Nervous System (CNS) organs and systems. Pathologies of particular interest to us are multiple sclerosis, psychiatric, and pediatric diseases such as pediatric multiple sclerosis or tuberous sclerosis. A major challenge is to characterize the future course of the pathological processes in each patient as early as possible in order to predict the progression of the disease and/or adverse neurological outcomes, and to develop better techniques for both monitoring response to therapy and for altering therapy (duration, dose and nature) in response to patient-specific changes in imaging characteristics. At term, this project will allow to introduce objective figures to correlate qualitative and quantitative phenotypic markers coming from the clinic and image analysis, mostly at the early stage of the pathologies. This will allow for the selection or adaptation of the treatment for patients at an early stage of the disease.

Informal International Partners

• Collaboration with Sherbrooke University (Sherbrooke, Canada): From Jun to Aug 2016, Michael Paquette, PhD student from Sherbrooke supervised by Maxime Descoteaux, visited the VisAGeS team to collaborate with Emmanuel Caruyer on the development on new analysis techniques for the structural brain connectome. This visit was funded by a MITACS/Inria scholarship.

• Collaboration with LTS5, EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) and Computer Science department, University of Verona (Verona, Italy): Alessandro Daducci, Gabriel Girard and Jean-Philippe Thiran visited the VisAGeS team for a 2 days workshop on the development of novel validation methods for the human brain connectome using software generated phantoms.

• Collaboration with the Mathematics department, Politecnico di Milano (Italy): Olivier Commowick and Christian Barillot visited the department for the annual meeting of the Italian statistical society and collaborated with Aymeric Stamm and Simone Vantini.

• Collaboration with the Microstructure Imaging Group, UCL (London, UK): Christian Barillot, Emmanuel Caruyer, Olivier Commowick and Sudhanya Chatterjee visited the group of Daniel Alexander for a workshop on “MRI based Virtual Histology: Meeting Tomorrow’s Healthcare Challenges Today”

• visit of Tobias Kober and Bénédicte Maréchal from the ACIT Siemens research group in Lausanne (http://w1.siemens.ch/home/ch/de/healthcare/produkte/ACIT/Pages/AClT.aspx) to discuss potential collaborations on the MP2Rage sequence and other brain MR imaging topics