Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

The Neurinfo Platform

Empenn is the founding actor of an experimental research platform which was installed in August 2009 at the University Hospital of Rennes. The University of Rennes 1, Inria, CNRS for the academic side, and the University Hospital of Rennes and the Cancer Institute “Eugene Marquis” for the clinical side, are partners of this neuroinformatics platform called Neurinfo (https://www.neurinfo.org).

Concerning the Neurinfo Platform, the activity domain is a continuum between methodological and technological research built around specific clinical research projects. On the medical field, the translational research domain mainly concerns medical imaging and more specifically the clinical neurosciences. Among them are multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diseases, surgical procedures of brain lesions, neuro-oncology and radiotherapy planning. Beyond these central nervous system applications, the platform is also open to alternative applications. Neurinfo ambitions to support the emergence of research projects based on their level of innovation, their pluri-disciplinarity and their ability to foster collaborations between different actors (public and private research entities, different medical specialties, different scientific profiles).

In this context, a research 3T MRI system (Siemens Verio) was acquired in summer 2009 in order to develop the clinical research in the domain of morphological, functional, structural and cellular in-vivo imaging. A new 3T Siemens Prisma MRI scanner was installed at the Neuroinfo platform in February 2018. In 2014, an equipment for simultaneous recording of EEG and MRI images was acquired from Brain Product. In 2015, a mock scanner for experimental set-up was acquired as well as a High Performance Computing environment made of one large computing cluster and a data center that is shared and operated by the Inria center and IRISA (UMR CNRS 6074). The computation cluster (480 cores) and the data center (up to 150 TB) are dedicated to host and process imaging data produced by the Neurinfo platform, but also by other research partners that share their protocols on the Neurinfo neuroinformatics system (currently more than 60 sites). In 2019, an MRI and EEG-compatible fNIRS system was acquired through a co-funding from the INS2I institute of CNRS and FEDER. At the end of 2019, GIS IBISA awarded the Neurinfo platform with a complementary funding that will be dedicated to supplement the current system with additional sensors (from 8x8 optodes to 16x16 optodes).