Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

Empenn (means “Brain” in Breton language) ERL U1228 research team is jointly affiliated with Inria, Inserm (National Institute of Health and Scientific Research), CNRS (INS2I institute), and University of Rennes I. It is a team of IRISA/UMR CNRS 6074. Empenn is based in Rennes, at both the medical and science campuses. The team follows the “VisAGeS” one that was created for 12 years in 2006 by Inria, As for “VisAGeS”, Empenn hosts the accreditation number U1228 renewed by Inserm in 2017, after a competitive evaluation conducted by both HCERES and Inserm.

Through this unique partnership, the ambition of Empenn is to establish a multidisciplinary team bringing together researchers in information sciences and medicine. Our medium- and long-term objective is to introduce our basic research to clinical practice, while maintaining the excellence of our methodological research.

Our goal is to foster research in medical imaging, neuroinformatics and population cohorts. In particular, the Empenn team targets the detection and development of imaging biomarkers for brain diseases and focus its efforts on translating this research to clinics and clinical neurosciences at large.

In particular, the objective of Empenn is to propose new statistical and computing methods, and to measure and model brain morphological, structural and functional states in order to better diagnose, monitor and deliver treatment for mental, neurological and substance use disorders. We propose combining advanced instrumental devices and new computational models to provide advanced diagnosis, therapeutic and neuro-rehabilitation solutions for some of the major disorders of the developing and aging brain.

Generic and challenging research topics in this broad domain include finding new ways to compare models and data, assist decisions and interpretation, and develop feedback from experiments. These activities are performed in close collaboration with the Neurinfo in vivo imaging platform, which is a critical environment for the experimental implementation of our research on challenging clinical research projects and the development of new clinical applications.