Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

• Title: Analysis of structural MR and DTI in neonates

• Inria principal investigator: Pierre Fillard

• International Partner:

  • Institution: University of Southern California (United States)

  • Laboratory: Image Lab at Children Hospital at Los Angeles

  • Researcher: Natasha Lepore

• International Partner:

  • Institution: University of Pennsylvania (United States)

  • Laboratory: Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory

  • Researcher: Caroline Brun

• 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 of premature versus normal neonates, using structural and diffusion MRI. This work will consist in identifying, characterizing and meticulously studying the brain structures that are different between the two groups. To do so, we propose to join forces between 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 hundreds of premature and normal neonates MR scans. This joint collaboration is consequently a unique chance of addressing key questions pertaining to neonatal and premature development. It will make it possible to elaborate new tools to analyze neonate MR images while tremendously increasing our knowledge of neuroanatomy at such an early stage in life.

Inria International Labs

Parietal has taken part to the program Inria@SiliconValley, and had a 18-months post-doc funded to work on the comparison of anatomical and functional connectivity (18 months, 2011-2013):

In this project, we build probabilistic models that relates quantitatively the observations in anatomical and functional connectivity. For instance given a set of brain regions, the level of functional integration might be predicted by the anatomical connectivity measurement derived from the fibers in a given population of subjects. More generally, we seek to extract latent factors explaining both connectivity measures across the population. Such models require specifically that a generative model is proposed to explain the observations in either domain, so that a meaningful and testable link is built between the two modalities. The inference problem can then be formulated as learning the coupling parameters that are necessary to model the association between modalities, and tested e.g. by assessing the ability of the learned model to generalize to new subjects. The aim is then to provide the mathematical and algorithmic tools necessary to build a standardized model of brain connectivity informed by both modalities, associated with confidence intervals to take into account between subject variability. Such an atlas is a long-term project, that requires adequate validation on high-resolution data, but it is tightly linked to this project.