Section: Other Grants and Activities

National Actions

Participants : Bertrand Thirion, Vincent Michel, Alexandre Gramfort, Pierre Fillard, Gaël Varoquaux.

Vimagine

Vimagine is an accepted ANR blanc project (2008-2012), which aims at building a novel view on the retinotopic organization of the visual cortex, based on MEG and MRI. Vimagine should open the way to understanding the dynamics of brain processes for low-level vision, with an emphasis on neuropathologies. This project is leaded by S. Baillet ( MMiXT, CNRS UPR640 LENA, Pitié-Salpêtrière), in collaboration with M.Clerc, O. Faugeras (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, Odyssée) and J. Lorenceau(LPPA, CNRS, Collège de France). The fMRI part of the project will be done by PARIETAL, and will consist in a study of spatially resolved retinotopic maps at the mm scale, the decoding of retinotopic information and the comparison of retinotopy with sulco-gyral anatomy.

Karametria

KaraMetria is an ANR lead by Alexis Roche (LNAO) and Pierre Fillard (Parietal ) whose goal is to develop new methods for feature-based morphometry (FBM) as opposed to voxel-based morphometry (VBM). In VBM, a subject or group of subjects is compared to another group of subjects based on the grey values of their MR images only. The inconvenient is that the interpretation of a change in grey-value is rather unclear (what are we detecting?). Conversely, in KaraMetria we propose to rely on anatomically well-defined features such as the gyri and sulci, the white matter fibers, or other brain internal structures such as the grey nuclei, where the detection of a change of shape is easier to interpret. Practically, our aim is to develop a registration framework able to produce a spatial transformation mapping at the same time all anatomical features of one subject onto the anatomical features of another. This transformation can then be used to build atlases of features, such as sulci or fibers, which are not available yet. Those atlases, in turn, can be used as a reference to compare individuals and determine if they statistically differ from a normal population and if yes, where and how they differ. A study on depressed teenagers lead by a clinical partner (INSERM UMR 797) will serve as proof of concept for the proposed framework. The actors of KaraMetria are the INRIA teams Parietal and Asclepios , the LNAO, the MAP5 (University Paris 5) and the INSERM UMR 797. The project will start in January 2010 for a time period of 3 years (budget: 615Keuros).

Resting-State project

The Resting-State project is a joint INRIA-INSERM research project (2008-2010), leaded by B. Thirion, and dedicated to the study of the connectivity of the brain during resting state based on fMRI data. It is a collaborative project with INSERM U562, U678, the Alchemy INRIA Saclay team and LNAO (CEA, DSV, Neurospin).

It was launched in February 2008 in an INRIA-INSERM joint young researchers seminary. The post-doc of Gaël Varoquaux is funded by this project, and will consist in inferring the structure of the main resting-state networks of the brain and the modulation of this spontaneous activity in various experimental contexts.

Work groups

• parietal is animating a working group on Classification, Statistics and fMRI imaging with Select and the LNAO team (CEA, DSV, Neurospin). One meeting per month took place in 2009 at Neurospin.

• J.B Poline leads a Neurospin research program on the study of genetics and neuroimaging data (Genim) at Neurospin. This group includes researchers from LNAO (CEA, DSV, Neurospin), Parietal , INSERM U562, INSERM U797, Supelec and CNG (Evry), with two meetings per month.