Interface[s] Montréal

Visualisation

Maxime Boucher

Ph.D. student in computer science, McConnell Brain Imaging Centre (BIC), McGill University

Hi-Tech Imaging of the Living Brain

View the presentation [In French]

The Centre d’imagerie cérébrale McConnell (CIC) is a multi-disciplinary laboratory engaged in a brain research and clinical program using high technology brain scanning equipment. A team of physical, computational, neurobiological and clinical scientists function as a single group focussed solely on understanding the brain in its normal state and in a variety of diseases. The scanner hardware includes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) systems which collect 3D data on brain structure and function. Functional images can measure many different types of brain physiology, including blood flow, energy metabolism and enzyme/neurotransmitter/receptor densities. The major application domain is that of ’brain mapping’ which maps the network of brain regions which are ‘activated’ during the performance of a particular cognitive or sensorimotor task. 3D anatomical images are first collected to identify the unique neuroanatomy of each subject. This information is used

• (i) for identifying the precise location of the activations seen in the corresponding functional images,
• (ii) for spatial normalization, where the 3D datasets from each subject are mapped into a common coordinate frame which allows experimental data from different brains to be combined, and
• (iii) to build computational, statistical atlases of normal neuroanatomy at different stages of life.

Maxime Boucher is a Ph.D. student in computer science at McGill University. He has an engineering diploma from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) in applied mathematics and computer science as well as a Bachelor in computer engineering from Ecole Polytechnique Montreal. He performed a research internship on regularization of fiber tractography using diffusion tensor imaging at Harvard Medical School, Boston. He holds a doctoral scholarship from FQRNT, a Canada Graduate Scholarship from NSERC in medical imaging and he is a Tomlinson fellowship from McGill University. His research interests are in geometric description of surfaces and complexity analysis at different scales.