Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Labs

MMINCARAV

EPFL-Inria

Associate Team involved in the International Lab:

• Title: Multimodal Microstructure-Informed Neuronal Connectivity: Acquisition, Reconstruction, Analysis and Validation

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) - Laboratoire de Traitement du Signal 5 - Jean-Philippe Thiran

• Start year: 2019

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/empenn/research/mmincarav-inria-epfl/

• Participants: Emmanuel Caruyer, Olivier Commowick, Julie Coloigner, Élise Bannier and Christian Barillot.

• The objectives of this associate team will be to address new scientific challenges related to the use of multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to derive microstructure indices and apply them to the measure of brain connectivity. We will focus on 4 aspects of this: first we will develop novel sampling techniques, with the objective to reduce acquisition time for the accurate reconstruction of microstructure indices using diffusion MRI; next we will propose joint T2 relaxometry and diffusion models for the description of microstructure, to take advantage of the complementarity of both modalities in the estimation of microstructure indices; in continuation, we will propose new statistical and network analysis methods using the microstructure-informed connectome, and evaluate its potential to reduce bias and false positives; last we will develop a realistic simulation tool combining a fine macroscopic description of fiber bundles, with a fast and realistic simulator at the mesoscopic scale developed by LTS5.

Other projects

Participants : Pierre Maurel, Christian Barillot, Claire Cury.

Gundishapur Program (Partenariat Hubert Curien franco-iranien)

This project is a collaboration between the Empenn team and the Institute of medical science and technologies (Shahid Beheshti university, Iran).

Combining EEG (Electroencephalogram) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) shows great promise in helping scientists to better understand the complex function of the brain. It can also be used in understanding the brain dysfunctions or specific behaviors. The integration of these two modalities can provide a good spatio-temporal resolution of the neuronal activities, and therefore, it can bring a good insight on the brain function. EEG is the recording of the electrical activity of the brain through scalp surface electrodes. We are already working in this area through the HEMISFER project, whose goal is to make full use of neurofeedback paradigm by using a coupling model associating functional and metabolic information from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electro-encephalography (EEG) to “enhance” the neurofeedback protocol. A former member of our team, Dr. Noorzadeh, has already worked on a part of this project, and is now in IMSAT (Iran). He is our main contact for this collaboration.

This project works on the integration methods, in order to first acquire the simultaneous data of high quality with the minimum possible artifacts, and also on biomedical applications in this regard. One of these applications is the source localization using the multi-modal data. Identifying neuronal sources in both high spatial and temporal resolution can open up a bright way to understand lots of diseases, among which epilepsy is the main one. The epileptic seizures or the inter-ictal discharges are nowadays only detected by EEG, but the origin of the activity is only inferred in terms of brain lobes. This spatial precision can be augmented and the method can be used in the precise detection of the focal points of epilepsy for the pre-surgical evaluations.

Informal International Collaborations

• Emmanuel Caruyer collaborates with Alice Bates, research fellow at Australian National University, Canberra, on "Dimensionality sampling for B-tensor encoding in diffusion MRI".

• Camille Maumet collaborates with Prof. Thomas Nichols and his group, NISOx at the Oxford Big Data Institute, with Prof. Jean-Baptiste Poline and his group at McGill University, with Prof. Satrajit Ghosh and his group at MIT, with Dr David Keator at UCI Irvine, with Dr. Karl Helmer at MGH, with Dr Tristan Glatard and his group at Concordia University and with international members of the INCF on neuroimaging data sharing.

• Julie Coloigner collaborates with Prof. Natasha Leporé and Dr. John Wood, Children's hospital Los Angeles, University Southern California.