Section: Application Domains

Behavior

Advances in the field of in vivo imaging offer new opportunities for addressing the management of resistant affective disorders and their consequences (suicide risk and socio-professional impact), and the management of spatial cognition disorders after stroke and their consequences (postural perturbations and the loss of autonomy). Our objective, and the main challenge in this context, will be to introduce medical image computing methods to the multidisciplinary field of behavioral disorders (cognitive disorders, particularly spatial and postural control disorders or anterograde memory impairment, mood disorders, notably resistant depression, schizophrenic disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, attention disorders, etc.) in order to gain a better understanding of the pathology and devise innovative therapeutic approaches.

We also expect to become a major player in the future and make important contributions with significant impacts, primarily in drug-resistant depression in young and old populations. In particular, we expect to provide new image-related metrics combining perfusion, metabolism and microstructural information regarding the brain in order to better characterize pathologies, provide prospective evolution values and potentially provide new brain stimulation targets that could be used in neurofeedback rehabilitation protocols or other types of brain stimulation procedure.

We aim to provide new imaging markers of mental diseases, especially in the context of mood disorders. The new biomarkers will be derived from the metabolic (ASL and later ASL+PET) point of view as well as from the microstructural point of view (multicompartment diffusion MRI and relaxometry). Similarly, we expect to exhibit imaging biomarker regularities combining metabolic and structural information. Over the longer term, we expect these biomarkers to be the target of neurofeedback rehabilitation procedures. Also, over the longer term, we expect to supplement the MRI markers with molecular marker ones coming from new PET tracers, especially those associated with serotonin intake, at one time point or during a rehabilitation protocol under hybrid PET-EEG-MRI neurofeedback procedures.