MAIN RESEARCH AREA:

My main research area is the Processing and Analysis of Medical Images, in which I lead a Medical Image Analysis Group. In it, my main research line is the Brain Tractography Analysis (Diffusion MRI). We work in the development of tools for the study and analysis of brain connectivity, using brain tractography data obtained with Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI).

This started during my postgraduate studies, at Neurospin, France, which main result was a method for the segmentation of known fiber fascicles from a multi-subject atlas (PhD thesis). Since then I’ve continued my research at Universidad de Concepción, working in collaboration with French researchers from the same center (Neurospin), mainly, Jean-François Mangin, Cyril Poupon and Josselin Houenou. The work has been getting richer little by little thanks to the collaboration of national researchers. This work has been possible thanks to the dedication and effort of many undergraduate and graduate students at Universidad de Concepción.

The studies are based on images from High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI). For the development of algorithms, high quality databases were used, most of them acquired and preprocessed at Neurospin.

The work/papers developed use clustering and segmentation algorithms to mainly study short association fascicles.

We’ve also focused on optimizing the developped algorithms, such as the algorithm for the segmentation of brain fibers.

Another area of interest is the optimized visualization of the tracts, where we have developed applications for a interactive visualization and manipulation of the fibers.

Many studies have used the segmentation of the known long fascicles, to perform analysis in different group of subjects, finding connectivity differences, for example, in bipolar syndrome patients. These studies have been carried out by our collaborators, where in each case, there is an important group of investigators participating.

Our objective is still the development and improvement of tools for the analysis of brain connectivity, now also are focused on the development of parcellations for the study of the human connectome.