VPH NoE Exemplar Projects and the VPH ToolKit - 5. Digital Patient Working Group: Modelling and visualising brain function and pathophysiology PDF | Print | E-mail

5. Digital Patient Working Group: Modelling and visualising brain function and pathophysiology

Lead: DPWG/FORTH, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The ERCIM project models brain function based on clinical data in order to better understand the causality of brain diseases such as epilepsy, dementia, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. At the first functional level, linear and nonlinear synchronisation methods are applied to study neuronal dynamics. The latter have been increasingly recognised to be an important mechanism by which specialised cortical and sub-cortical regions integrate their activity to form distributed neuronal assemblies that function in a cooperative manner. Synchronous oscillations of certain types of such assemblies in different frequency bands relate to different perceptual, motor or cognitive states and may be indicative of a wider range of cognitive functions or brain pathologies. At a second level, source estimation models and graph theoretic measures will be applied to better describe and understand the functional characteristics of brain networks.

The project also investigates brain tumours (especially glioblastoma) and normal brain tissue behaviour at the cellular and higher levels of biocomplexity. Such models will be individualised, therefore requiring pertinent image analysis, data processing and visualisation techniques in order to extract the necessary information, which will be the input to the cancer simulator. In particular, image analysis tasks (such as image registration fusion, segmentation, etc) will be applied in different scales (e.g. tissue 3DMRI images, microarray data, etc). Most of these activities are already being funded (e.g. ACGT for simulation tasks, BIOP ATTERN NoE for Brain Disorders). FORTH is additionally investing its own funds to brain network visualisation algorithms (and relevant clinical applications) development, etc. Significant progress has been made in the action lines mentioned both in R&D (cancer simulation has already gained significant attention and respect within ACGT and the EC), as well as in the purely scientific/academic area (e.g., a number of papers demonstrating the clinical value of brain networks to understand and model function, microarray analysis, etc.).

As a seed EP, functional modelling of the brain will require certain VPH ToolKit elements that are already generically described in WP3. However, some "fine-tuning" will be needed in order to meet the brain's specific needs. What will be needed from the VPH ToolKit includes: web-accessible repositories for data, annotations, patient information etc.; the DICOM waveform standard; model solutions to the inverse or forward brain source localisation problems; patient-specific customisation of models; data fitting; and GUIs specifically tailored to visualise causal and functional relations between different brain lobes. As an added value, the VPH NoE through this EP will also address the CNS (central nervous system).