Abstract

Abstract: I will describe the increasing role of computational models of anatomy and physiology coupled with medical images to build virtual models of humans useful for the diagnosis of a disease and for the planning and simulation of a therapy.

These computational models often involve geometrical, statistical, physical, and biological models at various scales.

I illustrate my presentation with three recent research projects of our team with partners:

1. the statistical modeling and analysis of sulcal lines on the brain cortex;
2. the modeling and simulation of brain tumors evolution;
3. the electro-mechanical modeling of the heart function;

and I conclude with some promising trends, including the analysis of in vivo microscopic images.

References available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/asclepios/

Biography: Nicholas Ayache is a Research Director at INRIA , the French Research Institute of Computer Science and Automatic Control, where he leads the ASCLEPIOS project-team whose research focuses on analysis and simulation of biomedical images. Nicholas also teaches graduate courses of Computer Vision and Image processing, in the applied mathematics department of the École Centrale de Paris, and at École Normale Supérieure.

Nicholas’ current research interests are in biomedical image analysis and simulation. This includes the analysis of medical and biological images with advanced geometrical, statistical, physical and functional models, the simulation of physiological systems with computational models built from biomedical images and other signals, and the application of these tools to medicine and biology to better assist prevention, diagnosis and therapy of diseases.

Nicholas is the recipient of the Grand Prize EADS 2006 and the 2008 Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award.