Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

CAPNEONATES

• Title: Analysis of structural MR and DTI in neonates

• Inria principal investigator: Bertrand Thirion [Parietal]

• Asclepios investigator: Xavier Pennec

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Institution: University of Southern California (United States)

  • Laboratory: Image Lab at Children Hospital at Los Angeles

  • Researcher: Natasha Leporé

• Duration: 2011 - 2013

• See also: http://www.capneonates.org/

• While survival is possible at increasingly lower gestational ages at birth, premature babies are at higher risk of developing mental disorders or learning disabilities than babies born at term. A precise identification of the developmental differences between premature and control neonates is consequently of utmost importance. Nowadays, the continuously improving quality and availability of MR systems makes it possible to precisely determine, characterize and compare brain structures such as cortical regions, or white matter fiber bundles. The objective of this project is to understand the developmental differences between premature and normal neonates, using structural and diffusion MRI. This work consists in identifying, characterizing and meticulously studying the brain structures that are different between the two groups. To do so, we join forces with the Parietal team at Inria and the University of Southern California. Parietal has a recognized expertise in medical image registration and in statistical analyses of groups of individuals. USC has a broad knowledge in MR image processing. In particular, the Children's Hospital at Los Angeles (CHLA), which is part of USC, is in the process of collecting a unique database of several hundred MR scans of premature and normal neonates. This joint collaboration consequently offers a unique chance of addressing key questions pertaining to neonatal and premature development. It will make it possible to elaborate new tools for analyzing neonate MR images while tremendously increasing our knowledge of neuroanatomy at an early stage in life.

Inria International Partners

Declared Inria International Partners

Stanford, Statistics Department

France Stanford collaborative project grant (2013-2014):Understanding Lower Back Pain through Geometric Statistical Analysis of computed tomography (CT) Images. Stanford, Statistics Dept & Nice Univ. Hospital. Principal investigators X. Pennec (Inria) and S. Holmes (Stanford). Collaboration on statistics on group-valued trees and geometric subspace learning [55] .

Collaboration with international hospitals

St Thomas' Hospital, King's College London, United Kingdom

Maxime Sermesant is a visiting lecturer in the Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, St Thomas' Hospital, King's College London lead by Pr Reza Razavi. The XMR facility within this hospital is a unique opportunity to validate and exploit the cardiovascular modelling work.

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

A collaboration with Dr Jan Unklebach, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and Dr Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, radiology instructor was initiated in 2013 around the topics of tumor growth modeling, radiotherapy planning and edema characterization from MRI. Matthieu Lê spent 2013 in the department of Radiation Physics at MGH.

Other International Hospitals

Collaborations with several other European hospitals have been established through the European projects VP2HF, Care4Me and MD PAEDIGREE.