The University of Picardie Jules Verne is a multidisciplinary university created in 1969 and welcomes 30,000 students. It has 35 research units and around 800 researchers. More specifically, the objectives of the CHIMERE laboratory are to personalise the diagnosis and the therapeutic approach of head and neck surgery; and the morphological and functional characterisation of pathologies of the cephalic extremity.
BIOFLOW Image, which is a stakeholder of the REVERT project, is a branch of CHIMERE, aiming to effectively model the flows of blood and CSF. It is based on the functional possibilities of magnetic resonance imaging to provide new information on the physiology of flows and to better diagnose and manage associated pathologies. Researchers are developing new methods for reconstructing and analysing medical images.
Within the project, UPJV will build a digital model dedicated to the interaction of fluids in the cranial system from new measurements, intracranial flow and pressure, obtained within the project. This group has led 3 doctoral students in this field over the past 10 years, and currently carrying out a national research project entitled “Human and Animal NUmerical Models for the crANio-spinal system – HANUMAN” .
Dr Olivier Balédent, the scientific lead for REVERT, says:
“Many cerebral pathologies have their origins or consequences in alterations of the dynamics of cerebral fluids. Some of them, such as hydrocephalus, are still not fully understood.
With the arrival of phase contrast MRI in Amiens at the end of the 1990s, we have shown that it is possible to quantify the flow of cerebral fluids and thus to better understand the different forms of hydrocephalus.
On the other side of the Channel, a different approach is being taken by studying intracranial pressure.
Nevertheless, neither of our teams fully understand this complex pathology.We know from the ancestral laws of physics and physiology that the dynamics of fluid flows and their cerebral pressures are linked. Our long discussions in Amiens and Cambridge have naturally led us to combine these two complementary approaches and to propose a new model of numerical simulation of cerebral dynamics. The new results that we will obtain for the first time will be precious assets to diagnose patients as precisely and early as possible to give them the best chance of recovery or improvement of their clinical condition.
Understanding the mechanism of brain dynamics is already a first step in understanding their potential physiopathologies.“