Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Partners

BARBANT

• Title: Boston and Rennes, a Brain image Analysis Team

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Harvard University (United States) - Medical School - Simon K. Warfield

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/barbant/

• Between 2012 and 2017, BARBANT was an Inria associate team shared between Inria VisAGeS research team and the Computational Radiology Laboratory at the Boston Children’s hospital (Harvard Medical School). The collaboration continued in 2018 aiming at better understanding the behavior of normal and pathological Central Nervous System (CNS) organs and systems. Pathologies of particular interest to us are multiple sclerosis, psychiatric, and pediatric diseases such as pediatric multiple sclerosis or tuberous sclerosis. A major challenge is to characterize the future course of the pathological processes in each patient as early as possible in order to predict the progression of the disease and/or adverse neurological outcomes, and to develop better techniques for both monitoring response to therapy and for altering therapy (duration, dose and nature) in response to patient-specific changes in imaging characteristics. At term, the goal is to introduce objective figures to correlate qualitative and quantitative phenotypic markers coming from the clinic and image analysis, mostly at the early stage of the pathologies. This will allow for the selection or adaptation of the treatment for patients at an early stage of the disease. Sudhanya Chatterjee's PhD was performed in 2018 under this collaboration.

Informal International Partners

• Collaboration with Neuropoly, Polytechnique Montreal: Haykel Snoussi visited the group of Julien Cohen-Adad and received an Inria-MITACS fellowship for a 3 months period (Nov. 2017-Jan. 2018). He worked on the processing of diffusion-weighted images of multiple sclerosis patients' spinal cord in the context of the EMISEP project. We also collaborate with Neuropoly, Polytechnique Montreal through the EMISEP project: Spinal cord data from the EMISEP study was shared with the group in Montreal for manual lesion segmentation and topological analysis of the presence of lesions, in the brain and spinal cord. This work resulted in a common publication [12].

• Camille Maumet collaborates with Prof. Thomas Nichols and his group, NISOx at the Oxford Big Data Institute and with international members of the INCF on neuroimaging data sharing.

• In the context of a project at Neurinfo, Elise Bannier and Jean-Christophe Ferré collaborated with Tobias Kober from Lausanne, to evaluate a sequence named FLAWS, allowing Fluid and White Matter supression for anterior thalamic nucleus visualization.