Dear colleagues,

Our team is looking for a postdoctoral fellow.
Please find below the informations about the position.

Many thanks
Olivier Colliot


Research topic: Computational anatomy of the hippocampus using very high resolution MRI at 7 Tesla: diffeomorphic registration and shape analysis
The hippocampus is an anatomical structure of the brain which plays critical roles in different brain disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. The hippocampus has the particularity of presenting a highly complex tridimensional organization with a large number of substructures, fields and layers.

Current approaches for shape analysis of the hippocampus only consider its external boundary and do not model its complex internal architecture. Indeed, using conventional MRI at 1.5T or 3T, only the external boundaries of the hippocampus can be visualized and its internal subregions remain inaccessible. The advent of ultra-high field MRI (7T and higher) has opened new perspectives by providing increased signal-to-noise ratio, increased tissular contrast and increased spatial resolution, which allows visualizing in vivo tiny anatomical structures (~100-200 microns). New computational anatomy approaches are needed to handle these complex anatomical structures.

The aim of this postdoctoral project is to develop new approaches for diffeomorphic registration and shape analysis of the internal structures of the hippocampus using 7T MRI data with very high spatial resolution. The developments will be based on the framework of large diffeomorphic deformations and matching of currents. New developments based on varifolds and functional currents will be performed in order to handle the complex shapes of the internal structures. The work will be done in collaboration with our partners at ENS de Cachan (Alain Trouvé) and Université Paris-Descartes (Joan Glaunès).

The developed approaches will be applied to detect subtle alterations in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy in which 7T MRI has been acquired. These clinical applications will be done in collaboration with our partners at Neurospin, Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, and University of Minnesota.


Profile of the candidate
The ideal candidate should have previous experience in the design of new methods for morphometry, shape analysis or registration of anatomical medical images. However, we will also consider outstanding scientific profiles in the fields of image processing/computer vision, without previous experience of the specific topics mentioned above.


About the ARAMIS team
ARAMIS is a joint research team between CNRS, INRIA, Inserm and UPMC within the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM). The ICM (http://icm-institute.org/menu/foundation/mission?lang=en) is a recently created neuroscience center based in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which is the largest adult hospital in Europe and has a long tradition of neuroscience and neurology. The ICM brings together 500 researchers covering the whole field of neuroscience.

ARAMIS is the methodological research team of the ICM. It is a multidisciplinary group (electrical engineering, computer science, neurology) with about 30 members. The team aims at designing new mathematical and computational approaches for the analysis of images and signals of the human brain. The key domains of expertise of the team are: i) automatic segmentation of brain structures; ii) shape analysis and longitudinal modeling; iii) machine learning; iv) analysis of brain connectivity. The team has developed advanced methods for the analysis of anatomical and functional neuroimaging data including the fully automatic approach SACHA to segment the hippocampus and the amygdala, pattern classification algorithms, the Deformetrica software for shape analysis, and graph-theory approaches to functional connectivity. The team also has strong expertise in the management of multi-center neuroimaging studies, including multi-site MRI harmonization, quality control and analysis of massive datasets. The team has close and enduring collaborations with different clinical teams of the ICM and the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital to apply advanced image analysis approaches to neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, fronto-temporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome.

Contact information
Olivier Colliot - olivier.colliot@upmc.fr - http://cogimage.dsi.cnrs.fr/perso/colliot/

More information:
https://www.inria.fr/en/institute/recruitment/offers/post-doctoral-research-fellowships/post-doctoral-research-fellowships/campaign-2014/(view)/details.html?id=PNGFK026203F3VBQB6G68LOE1&ContractType=4546&LG=EN&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=8265&nPostingTargetID=13985&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=19