Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

ANR PRCE CaMoPi – Capture and Modelling of the Shod Foot in Motion

The main objective of the CaMoPi project is to capture and model dynamic aspects of the human foot with and without shoes. To this purpose, video and X-ray imagery will be combined to generate novel types of data from which major breakthroughs in foot motion modelling are expected. Given the complexity of the internal foot structure, little is known about the exact motion of its inner structure and the relationship with the shoe. Hence the current state-of-the art shoe conception process still relies largely on ad-hoc know-how. This project aims at better understanding the inner mechanisms of the shod foot in motion in order to rationalise and therefore speed up and improve shoe design in terms of comfort, performance, and cost. This requires the development of capture technologies that do not yet exist in order to provide full dense models of the foot in motion. To reach its goals, the CaMoPi consortium comprises complementary expertise from academic partners : Inria (combined video and X-ray capture and modeling) and Mines St Etienne (finite element modeling), as well as industrial : CTC Lyon (shoe conception and manufacturing, dissemination). The project has effectively started in October 2017 and is currently handled by Tomas Svaton, recruited as an engineer in April 2018.

ANR JCJC SEMBA – Shape, Motion and Body composition to Anatomy

Existing medical imaging techniques, such as Computed Tomography (CT), Dual Energy X-Ray Absorption (DEXA) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), allow to observe internal tissues (such as adipose, muscle, and bone tissues) of in-vivo patients. However, these imaging modalities involve heavy and expensive equipment as well as time consuming procedures. External dynamic measurements can be acquired with optical scanning equipment, e.g. cameras or depth sensors. These allow high spatial and temporal resolution acquisitions of the surface of living moving bodies. The main research question of SEMBA is: "can the internal observations be inferred from the dynamic external ones only?". SEMBA’s first hypothesis is that the quantity and distribution of adipose, muscle and bone tissues determine the shape of the surface of a person. However, two subjects with a similar shape may have different quantities and distributions of these tissues. Quantifying adipose, bone and muscle tissue from only a static observation of the surface of the human might be ambiguous. SEMBA's second hypothesis is that the shape deformations observed while the body performs highly dynamic motions will help disambiguating the amount and distribution of the different tissues. The dynamics contain key information that is not present in the static shape. SEMBA’s first objective is to learn statistical anatomic models with accurate distributions of adipose, muscle, and bone tissue. These models are going to be learned by leveraging medical dataset containing MRI and DEXA images. SEMBA's second objective will be to develop computational models to obtain a subject-specific anatomic model with an accurate distribution of adipose, muscle, and bone tissue from external dynamic measurements only.

ANR JCJC 3DMOVE - Learning to synthesize 3D dynamic human motion

It is now possible to capture time-varying 3D point clouds at high spatial and temporal resolution. This allows for high-quality acquisitions of human bodies and faces in motion. However, tools to process and analyze these data robustly and automatically are missing. Such tools are critical to learning generative models of human motion, which can be leveraged to create plausible synthetic human motion sequences. This has the potential to influence virtual reality applications such as virtual change rooms or crowd simulations. Developing such tools is challenging due to the high variability in human shape and motion and due to significant geometric and topological acquisition noise present in state-of-the-art acquisitions. The main objective of 3DMOVE is to automatically compute high-quality generative models from a database of raw dense 3D motion sequences for human bodies and faces. To achieve this objective, 3DMOVE will leverage recently developed deep learning techniques. The project also involves developing tools to assess the quality of the generated motions using perceptual studies. This project currently involves one Ph.D. student who was hired in November 2019.

Competitivity Clusters

FUI24 SPINE-PDCA

The goal of the SPINE-PDCA project is to develop a unique medical platform that will streamline the medical procedure and achieve all the steps of a minimally invasive surgery intervention with great precision through a complete integration of two complementary systems for pre-operative planning (EOS platform from EOS IMAGING) and imaging/intra-operative navigation (SGV3D system from SURGIVISIO). Innovative low-dose tracking and reconstruction algorithms will be developed by Inria, and collaboration with two hospitals (APHP Trousseau and CHU Grenoble) will ensure clinical feasibility. The medical need is particularly strong in the field of spinal deformity surgery which can, in case of incorrect positioning of the implants, result in serious musculoskeletal injury, a high repeat rate (10 to 40% of implants are poorly positioned in spine surgery) and important care costs. In paediatric surgery (e. g. idiopathic scoliosis), the rate of exposure to X-rays is an additional major consideration in choosing the surgical approach to engage. For these interventions, advanced linkage between planning, navigation and postoperative verification is essential to ensure accurate patient assessment, appropriate surgical procedure and outcome consistent with clinical objectives. The project has effectively started in October 2018 with Di Meng's recruitment as a PhD candidate.