Nicholas Ayache, PhD Research Director INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France

From Cardiac Images to Personalized Heart Models:
Recent Advances and New Applications

Abstract

This talk will present some recent advances in Computational Cardiology, where the objective is to develop patient-specific cardiac models useful for the diagnosis, the prognosis and the therapy of cardiovascular diseases. It will describe and illustrate different levels of modeling, from cardiac anatomy to physiology, based on geometrical, statistical and biophysical sub-models.

Then the talk will present how images and other biological signals measured on the patient can be used to personalize the model parameters in order to create a patient-specific computational model of the heart. New directions will also be presented, like the generation of databases of synthetic but realistic cardiac images to be used for the training of machine learning algorithms or for the benchmarking of image processing algorithms.

Bio

Nicholas Ayache is a Research Director at INRIA (French Research Institute in Computer Science and Automatic Control), Sophia-Antipolis, France, where he was the scientific leader of the EPIDAURE research group on medical image analysis and robotics between 1993 and 2005, and has been the leader of the ASCLEPIOS research group on biomedical image analysis and simulation since November 2005.

Dr. Ayache received his Ph.D in 1983, and his "Thèse d'État" in 1988, both in computer science, from the University of Paris XI, on the development of vision capabilities for autonomous robots, more precisely on topics related to model based object recognition, passive stereovision, and multisensor fusion. Since 1988, Dr. Ayache's research interests have been in Biomedical Image Analysis and Simulation including 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. He has also been involved in the design of innovative systems for surgery simulation and image-guided therapy. Dr. Nicholas Ayache is the author and co-author of 9 books, 12 patents, and more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific publications in these domains which have received over 17,500 citations (h-index 72), according to Google Scholar.

Nicholas Ayache received in December 2006, the "EADS Grand Prize of Information Sciences and Applications" from a jury of French Academy of Sciences, in October 2007, the "Researcher of the Year award" from the "Nouvel Economiste" Journal and in October 2008 the "Microsoft Award for Science in Europe" awarded jointly by he Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences.