Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Research Visitors

Visits of International Scientists

• Pete Hammer, a senior researcher at Harvard University (http://www.childrenshospital.org/researchers/peter-e-hammer), visited the MAGRIT team in July 2019. He gave a talk to the Department 1 in Loria, he helped out with mechanical modeling of the mitral valve and he provided advice to Daryna Panicheva during one week.

• Douglas Perrin, a senior researcher at Harvard University (http://www.childrenshospital.org/researchers/douglas-perrin), visited the MAGRIT team in September 2019. He gave a talk to the Department 1 in Loria, he worked on the segmentation of the mitral valve leaflet and he provided advice to Daryna Panicheva during one week.

• Ioana Ilea, Technical University Cluj-Napoca visited the Magrit team in October. She gave a talk entitled “Robust classification on covariance matrix space: Application to texture”.

Internships

Anastasiia Onanko from Kiev Polytechnique Institute was hosted to fulfill her Master internship (Erasmus mobility program). She worked to initiate a new research line in collaboration with our partners from CHRU Nancy, who were interested in having faster, more automated, but still faithful, means of detecting intracranial aneurysms from 3D magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) images. The deep learning approach that was followed addressed three challenges: the impossibility to use full-sized 3D MRA as input to a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the difficulty to collect annotated data, and the scarcity of aneurysms within the whole brain vasculature (about 50 voxels in a volume that counts millions of voxels). We designed two patch-based classification approaches, with roughly annotated data, and experimented with various data augmentation protocols. Results are preliminary and need to be consolidated. In particular, the current (limited) database will be expanded in the next few months.

Visits to International Teams

Research Stays Abroad

• Pierre-Frédéric Villard spent one month (May 2019) at Uppsala University working on the INVIVE project. His work there includes supervising PhD student Igor Tominec, meeting with a physiologist expert in respiration muscles and working on an implicit surface representation of the diaphragm.

• Daryna Panicheva and Pierre-Frédéric Villard stayed in Harvard University in Cambridge (USA) respectively 2 weeks and 1 month in the context of the CURATIVE team. Each of them gave a talk to the Harvard Biorobotics Lab. An acquisition of a porcine mitral valve was done with 4 different amounts of pressure with a microCT scan. Biomechanical simulations on the mitral valve were also studied in term of stability and convergence.