Section: Other Grants and Activities

National initiatives

ODL Vignes

Participants : Alexandre Abadie, Romain Carpentier, Pierre Hellier, Pierre Jannin, Xavier Morandi.

duration : 24 months, from 01/10/2008

This two years project is devoted to the ongoing development of a software platform for intraoperative imaging. This grant funds the position of Romain Carpentier.

ANR “Technologies Logicielles”, NeuroLOG Project

Participants : Bacem Wali, Farooq Ahmad, Franck Michel, Daniel Garcia-Lorenzo, Bernard Gibaud, Christian Barillot.

duration : 40 months, from 01/04/2007

The NeuroLOG project has for objective to build a software environment in an open environment for the integration of resources in medical imaging (data, images and also image processing tools) and to confront this environment to target applications coming mainly from the neuroimaging and the oncology domains. This project intends to address problems related to:

• The management and the access to semi-structured heterogenous and distributed data in an open environment;

• The control and the security of the access of the sensitive medical data;

• The control of data and computing workflows involved in high demanding processing procedures by accessing grid computing infrastructures;

• The extraction and the quantification of parameters for relevant application such as multiple sclerosis, stroke and brain tumours.

In addition to our Unit/Project and the Paris project from IRISA, this grant is conducted by CNRS/I3S at Sophia-Antipolis and is performed in collaboration with INRIA team Asclepios (Sophia-Antipolis), GIN INSERM Research Center U836 from Grenoble, IFR 49 "Functional Neuroimagery" (Paris La Pitié Salpétrière), the MIS Laboratory at Amiens and Business Objects (now part of the SAP Group) and Visioscopie for the industrial part.

Our current participation within the NeuroLOG project concerned the first work package, especially on the elaboration of the proposed system architecture, and the implementation of the Data Manager and Metadata Manager; the second work package, on the development of the "OntoNeuroLog" ontology, and the Application work package, on the specification of the different test bed applications.

ANR USComp

Participants : Pierre Hellier, Christian Barillot.

We participate in the US comp project, headed by Lagadic project. UScomp aims at developping methods to compensate in real-time the soft tissue motion. Organs are imaged with an ultrasound probe held by a robotic arm. Within the project, we have contributed to develop a real-time speckle filter thanks to a GPU implementation of an adapted NL-means approach.

ANR “Neurological and Psychiatric diseases“ NUCLEIPARK

Participant : Christian Barillot.

This three-year project, led by CEA/NEUROSPIN (Cyril Poupon) in Saclay, will start in fall 2009. It involves a collaboration with Visages and Odyssee INRIA project-teams and INSERM La Pitié-Salpétrière, Paris. Its goal is to study high field MR imaging (7T and 3T) of the brainstem, the deep nuclei and their connections in the parkinsonian symdromes, with applications to prognosis, pathophysiology and improvement of therapeutic strategies methodological solutions. Our contribution in this project is on processing of diffusion imaging and on study of cortical differences between the different populations.

ANR Cosinus VIP

Participants : Bernard Gibaud, Olivier Luong, Christian Barillot.

VIP is collaborative project supported by ANR "Conception and Simulation"; it was accepted in 2009 (around 1 million euros). VIP aims at building a computing environment enabling multi-modality, multi-organ and dynamic (4D) medical image simulation, using GRID infrastructure. The goal is to integrate proven simulation software of the four main imaging modalities (MRI, US, PET and X-Ray/CT), and to cope interoperability challenges among simulators. The partners are CREATIS in Lyon (maain contractor, Principal Investigator: Tristan Glatard), UNS-I3S in Nice, CEA-LETI in Grenoble and MAAT-G Maat G, a spanish company. The role of VISAGES in this project concerns primarily Task 1.1 and Task 3.3, focusing respectively on ontologies development and application to multiple sclerosis images simulation.

3D-MORPHINE: Computational methods for the automated analysis of virtual hominid endocasts (2009-2010)

Participants : Benoit Combes, Sylvain Prima.

duration : 24 months, from 01/01/2009

Over the last 15 years, CT has been extensively used to build “virtual” endocranial casts in a precise and non-invasive way. Studying endocasts is of the utmost importance, as they constitute the only way to indirectly assess global (size, shape) and sometimes local characteristics (meningeal/sulcal/gyral patterns) of the external cerebral anatomy of extinct species, and especially hominids. To date, there exist only few tools to study virtual endocasts in an automated or semi-automated way, and in an objective and reproducible manner. The objective of this Collaborative Research Initiative (ARC) coordinated by Sylvain Prima is to devise, implement, validate and apply new computational methods for the automated and objective morphometric analysis of extant and extinct hominid cranial endocasts. This work is jointly led by the Visages Team at INRIA Rennes, the Asclepios Team at INRIA Sophia Antipolis and the ICAR team at CNRS Montpellier, as well as the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, the Museum of Toulouse, the Transvaal Museum (Pretoria, South Africa) and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium). Web: http://3dmorphine.inria.fr .