CIS – “Get to know your neighbors” Seminar Series
“Microstructure imaging by diffusion MRI: modeling, simulation, machine learning, application to brain imaging and more”
Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran, Head of the Signal Processing Laboratory 5 EPFL
Monday, March 7, 2022 3:15 – 4:15pm (CET) | Hybrid
Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is the reference imaging modality both for functional and structural study of the human brain. Diffusion MR imaging allows measuring the water diffusion properties in every voxel of a volume. When considering the white matter of the brain, this low-level information allows to infer higher-level information, namely about the orientation of the neuronal fiber bundles, and therefore about brain connectivity as a whole.
In this talk we will first give a brief introduction to the physical phenomenon of diffusion and how it can be used in MRI to infer brain neuronal fiber orientation information. Then we will show that it actually can provide much more information than just fiber orientation. Indeed, by developing realistic tissue microstructure models, advanced diffusion MR sequences and robust model estimation techniques, we will show how to estimate tissue parameters at the microscopic scale from the macroscopic MR signals. In particular, we will introduce some of our recent works in this domain, where hyper-realistic synthetic tissue models, advanced Monte-Carlo simulations and ML-based estimation techniques are developed and combined. We will show the application of those techniques to address the analysis of the brain microstructure and discuss their potential in the analysis of other tissues.
His research field is computational imaging, with applications in many domains including medical image analysis (diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging and digital pathology) and computer vision. He also holds a part-time Associate Professor position with the Department of Radiology of the University Hospital Center (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UNIL). Prof. Thiran is author or co-author of 1 book, 9 book chapters, 250 journal papers and more than 270 peer-reviewed papers published in the proceedings of international conferences. He holds 12 international patents.