IMT Atlantique covers a broad spectrum in the field of engineering for health. This ranges from the design and development of medical devices such as the study of radio-elements produced with the ARRONAX cyclotron, or XEMIS for 3-photon gamma imaging or the connected knee prostheses developed at the RHU FellowKnee, to the development of diagnostic radioisotopes.
The theme also includes the modeling of new e-Health solutions from the economic perspective in terms of societal impact, to the evaluation of medical technologies and innovation in the organization of health services. Finally, our work focuses on digital medical data security, data science and medical decision support, interventional surgery support via image processing and augmented or virtual reality, as well as functional or orthoptic rehabilitation.
Research Consortia (Chaires)
- AI-4-Child : Help for patients with cerebral palsy
- BOPA : augmented operating room innovation
- Medical imagery for interventional therapies
- M@D: Home Care
- Veterinary telemedicine
Some partners
SEED, which stands for Societal, Energy, Environmental, industrial and Digital transitions, is a 60-month interdisciplinary, international and intersectoral doctoral training programme offered by IMT Atlantique and co-funded by the European Union. The programme itself is designed to nurture four key dimensions: thesis interdisciplinarity, internationality, cross-sector experience, and promotion of innovation. It offers 40 fully funded early-stage researcher (ESR) positions within three different tracks. Each track builds on the same fundamental excellence trainings implementing a 4i approach (Interdisciplinarity, Internationality, Intersectorial, Innovation), while providing a different degree of mobility and focus:
Issues in surgery can be related to collaboration problems such as miscommunication and misunderstanding. Analysis of these collaborative situations can be done by experts, but it is a long and complex process. Moreover, this approach does not allow for real-time analysis and feedback on the collaboration. Some recent approaches aim to assess and model the quality of collaboration using measures that can be computed in real-time (e.g., non-verbal, gaze, physiological data). Considering some of the challenges related to the evaluation and modeling of collaboration, the SAAC project aims to compute metrics in real-time to report on the quality of collaboration within a group. The ultimate goal of SAAC is for the system to be seen as a collaborating system by the team, able to interact with the team when detecting miscommunication or miscoordination to prevent some adverse events.
This project aims to deepen our understanding of the role of the cerebellum in social cognition and social-emotional behavior, by studying patients with autosomal dominant spinocerebellar ataxias (SCA). The cerebellum, long associated with motor skills, is now recognized for its cognitive and emotional functions. Using advanced neuroimaging techniques and comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, we hope to characterize social-cognitive deficits in SCA and identify structural and functional abnormalities of the cerebellum. This multidisciplinary project could lead to non-pharmacological clinical interventions and offer psycho-educational support to patients and their families, filling an important gap in the management of ACS.
Intelligent orthopedic implants offer exciting prospects, particularly for improving post-surgical follow-up. Today, however, the technologies available for their power supply are not suited to powering the all-metal prostheses used in orthopedics. The Piezoknee project aims to exploit a wireless power transmission solution based on acoustic waves (APT: Acoustic Power Transmission) to power an intelligent knee implant (SOI: Smart Orthopedic Implant) capable of transmitting physiological information (temperature, pH, mechanical stress) to help prevent any complications.
The HOPES project funded by the ANR 2021 with 270 KE is led by a young researcher RESTREPO RUIZ Maria-Isabel on the planning of work schedules and employee rounds over a multi-period horizon for home-based services. HOPES will propose innovative decision support tools to solve these complex problems by taking into account work rules, individual preferences and different sources of uncertainty. To do so, we will rely on the formulation and design of new optimization approaches integrating techniques from data science and deterministic and stochastic optimization. Instead of proposing a method that works only for a specific application, HOPES aims to propose a general framework that can be extended to solve different variants of the problem. The decision support tools developed are expected to improve the quality of service for users, the well-being of employees, and to improve the planning and execution of home service operations.
While machine learning (ML) can lead to great advancements with respect to digital services and applications in the field of medicine, the training process based on real medical patient data is blocked by the fact that uncontrolled access to and exposure of such assets is not allowed by data protection legislation. The EU-funded PAROMA-MED project aims to develop novel technologies, tools, services and architectures for patients, health professionals, data scientists and health domain businesses so that they will be able to interact in the context of data and ML federations according to legal constraints and with complete respect to data owners rights from privacy protection to fine grained governance, without performance and functionality penalties of ML/AI workflows and applications.
The overall objective of e-VITA is to improve well-being in older adults in Europe and Japan and thereby promote active and healthy ageing, contribute to independent living, and reduce risks of social exclusion of older adults. The multidisciplinary consortium collaborating in this project will develop an innovative ICT-based virtual coaching system to detect subtle changes in physical, cognitive, psychological and social domains of older adult’s daily life. The e-VITA virtual coach will thus provide personalized recommendations and interventions, for sustainable wellbeing in a smart living environment at home.
Industry of the Future is characterized by smart automation and connectivity, flexible and adaptive processes, as well as sustainable manufacturing practices.
To realize this ambitious vision, system models that aggregate individual digital models of components or subsystems (digital twins) and processes need to be developed to enable companies to meet the demands of the new industrial economic paradigm. The term “digital twin” is recent but the underlying concepts are not new. Digital twins have been shown to provide real benefits to the production life cycles of companies.
Social anxiety is a global problem with significant personal and societal costs. Virtual reality makes it possible to consider new treatment alternatives, in particular for exposure therapy: a practitioner can gradually confront patients with the situations that are problematic to them. In this context, it is important to afford fine control over the stress experienced by the patient in these virtual situations. However, the parameters - and their interactions - influencing the amount and nature of the stress experienced in these interactions are still poorly understood.
Imaging the brain activity is fundamentally important for many brain-related scientific disciplines.
