Section: Overall Objectives
Parietal@Neuropsin
Bertrand Thirion joined INRIA Futurs/Saclay on November 1st, 2005, where he started to work with J.B.Poline (CEA, DSV, SHFJ) and two students, A. Tucholka and C. Damon. All of them moved to the novel Neurospin research Centre on January 1st, 2007. Parietal was created as an INRIA project team on July 1st, 2009. As an INRIA team, the originality of parietal is that it is situated within the CEA/DSV high-field neuroimaging platform, Neurospin .
Neurospin is a leading neuroimaging centre that aims at producing high quality data through novel high field MRI scanners (http://www-dsv.cea.fr/neurospin/ ): 3T for humans (with a 32 channels antenna), 7T for humans (the only one in France), a 7T MRI scanner for rats, EEG EEG-MRI compatible and MEG equipment. By 2013, Neurospin should have the first 11.7T MRI scanner for humans in the world.
These formidable equipment will produce better quality and/or higher resolution images. While most current data analysis solutions might not allow neuroscientists to take fully advantage of high-quality data, parietal commits itself to developing original methods to analyse anatomical and functional brain images in order to better capture their informative content. This can be achieved by introducing new modelling tools (mathematical morphology, shape analysis) statistical techniques (such as descriptive statistics, data mining, inference, model selection), and through the use of intensive computation to analyse the large volumes of data. parietal also shares its tools with various developers of neuroscientific applications and neuroscientists (medINRIA, nipy project, functional toolbox of Brainvisa).
