Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

Défis scientifiques 2019 of University of Rennes 1: Compensating analytic variability for a better use of open data (2019, 6500€).

Participant : Camille Maumet.

In neuroimaging, open data are now well developed with hundred of thousands of images available for the research community. However, those data are still mainly studied in isolation, limiting the potential for new discoveries. Here we focus our efforts on developing neuroinformatics standards and algorithms that will support publication and combination of open datasets.

Region Bretagne: project VARANASI

Participants : Christian Barillot, Camille Maumet, Xavier Rolland.

Thanks to the development of open science practices, more and more public datasets are available to the research community. In the field of brain imaging, these data, combined, bring a critical increase in sample size, necessary to build robust models of the typical and atypical brain. However, in order to build valid inferences on these data, we need to take into account their heterogeneity. Variability can arise due to multiple factors such as: differences in imaging instruments, in acquisitions protocols and even, in post-processing pipelines. In particular, the expansion of open source machine learning workflows creates a multitude of possible outputs out of the same dataset. The variations induced by this methodological plurality can be reFerréd to as ‘analytic variability’ which will be the focus of the thesis funded in half by region Bretagne. The thesis of Xavier Rolland (2018-2021) will address two challenges: 1) How to combine neuroimaging data generated by different analysis pipelines? 2) How to publish neuroimages with an adequate level of metadata to enable their reuse? Methodological developments will combine machine learning techniques with methods from knowledge representation.