• Bernard Gibaud - Leader
• Elsa Magro - Master student, University Hospital Brest
• Tristan Moreau - PhD student
• Xavier Morandi - Medical expert
• Romuald Seizeur - Medical expert

This projet is in the continuity of Ammar Mechouche's PhD on the semantic annotation of cortical structures. The general objective remains to produce image annotations that enable to associate explicit semantics to anatomical features extracted from anatomical MRI images and DTI images. Such features can be regions of interest (ROI) representing anatomical structures such as gyri or gyri parts, as well as fiber bundles extracted from DTI images. The annotations refer to ontologies, that provide a reference terminology and represent the common properties of the referred entities. In our vision, such an approach can be used for various purposes: (1) reasoning - e.g. spatial reasoning - about anatomical entities, especially in the context of surgery planning; (2) intelligent querying of image repositories, and (3) mediation for the integration of heterogeneous databases.

In a preliminary phase of the project (Master student work of Elsa Magro in 2010) we investigated in a population of 20 healthy subjects the connections within the central area, based on a ROI parcellation deduced from the sulcal folds (figure 1).



This study brought interesting results about U-fibers connecting the precentral and postcentral gyri (figure 2).



In the following of the project we are going to propose new methods to jointly annotate regions of the brain cortex and fiber bundles connecting them, based on a prior knowledge embedded in an ontology.