Sinergia Consortium Brain Communication Pathways

Welcome to the Brain Communication Pathways Sinergia Consortium website.

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This consortium is composed of an international team of neuroscientists coming from Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne, University of Geneva and Geneva University Hospital, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne all based in Switzerland as well as University of Fribourg (Switzerland), University Pompeu Fabra in Spain and Ghent University in Belgium. The consortium is funded by a Sinergia Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The project consists in exploring brain communication pathways by combining diffusion based quantitative structural connectivity and EEG source imaging with application to physiological and epileptic networks.

Specific aims are:

  • Develop a reconstruction framework, which will provide, from ESI and dMRI data, a brain network representation. To each node, representing a cortical region, an electrical source will be associated (time series). Each edge will represent an existing fiber tract to which information of length, size, axonal diameter distribution and myelination will be associated.
  • Develop new methods to constrain ESI sources by using structural connectivity information.
  • Determine the connection specific propagation delays by combining microstructural information and phase lags in well-defined visual stimulus paradigms and intracranial electrophysiology.
  • Fit new computational models of spontaneous activity and epilepsy to study criticality in the brain.
  • Develop a dedicated analysis framework to follow and characterize the propagation of spatio-temporal coupling with a dynamic network model.
  • Explore with this framework mechanisms of connectome constrained functional connectivity in the visual system and associated feed-forward and –backward mechanisms.
  • Explore with this framework the mechanisms of seizure onset, propagation and inter-ictal resting activity in epileptic patients.

The novel technical developments generated within the project will be implemented and distributed freely in within Connectome Mapper 3 software, our open-source processing pipeline software.

See Project-170873 page for more details.

Latest News

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    Brain Dynamics on the Connectome - Summer School 2021

    This practical online course introduces advanced topics in multimodal brain connectomics. The lectures follow the structure of a pipeline to estimate structural connectivity from diffusion MRI data, dynamic functional connectivity from M/EEG recordings and integrate them together with computational modeling. The event is sponsored by the SNF Sinergia Grant 170873 and the Lemanic Neuroscience Doctoral School, as well as by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility and ReproNim initiatives.

Sinergia Consortium Brain Connectomics

Project keywords

  • Brain Connectomics
  • Effective Connectivity
  • Communication through Coherence
  • Diffusion MRI
  • Microstructural Imaging
  • Electrical Source Imaging
  • Functional Brain Dynamics
  • Epilepsy

Principal investigators

Prof. Patric Hagmann (lead)

Radiology Research Center
Department of Radiology
Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV)
Rue Centrale 7, 4th floor
CH-1003 Lausanne
Switzerland

Prof. Serge Vulliémoz

EEG and Epilepsy Unit
Department of Neurology
University Hospital of Geneva
Rue Gabrielle Perret-Gentil 4
CH-1205 Geneva
Switzerland

Prof. Christoph Michel

Faculty of Medicine
Faculty of Medicine
University of Geneva
Campus Biotech
Chemin des Mines 9
CH-1202 Geneva Switzerland

Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran

Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS5)
EPFL-STI-IEL-LTS5
Station 11
CH-1015 Lausanne
Switzerland

Partners

Prof. Gijs Plomp

Department of Psychology
University of Fribourg
Rue P.-A.-de-Faucigny 2
CH-1700 Fribourg
Switzerland

Prof. Pieter Van Mierlo

ELIS Electronics and Information Systems
Ghent University
Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 15
BE-9000 Gent
Belgium

Prof. Gustavo Deco

Computational Neuroscience Research Group
Department of Information and Communication Technologies
Universidad Pompeu Fabra / ICREA
Roc Boronat, 138
ES-08018 Barcelona