Coordinator :

Michel Dojat PhD, HDR

Project manager : Michael Kain

Local administrative supervision : Inria

 

About the hub

The mission of the Information Analysis and Management hub, IAM (https://portal.fli-iam.irisa.fr/home), is to build an infrastructure (hardware and software) accessible to users of the French in vivo imaging platforms, in order to facilitate the access and reuse of imaging data, to store, manage and process large clinical and preclinical imaging data sets and associated metadata.

The hub brings together experts in medical image processing from French laboratories in and outside the regional hubs, under the supervision of INRIA (Rennes), CNRS (ICUBE, I3S, Creatis, CRMBM), CEA (MIRCen) and INSERM (Brest, Nancy, Grenoble). INRIA supervises the scientific coordination of the hub. Initially coordinated by a tandem formed by Christian BARILLOT and Michel DOJAT assisted by Michael KAIN, the IAM hub is coordinated by Michel DOJAT with the support of Michael KAIN since the death of Christian BARILLOT in June 2020. We are grateful to our colleague Christian, for the work he has done over the years, for his personal skills  and for his vision.

The implementation of the project followed two stages. The first one, from 2013 to 2018, was dedicated to the creation of a federated image analysis and data management solution ensuring the interoperability of existing heterogeneous and distributed solutions implementing raw and metadata indexing (e.g., using semantic models or ontologies) of information. Four national management solutions pre-existing to IAM were selected: CATI (CEA, Paris-Sud), SHANOIR (INRIA, Rennes), MediBase (CNRS, Strasbourg) and Archimed (INSERM, Nancy). Three existing national solutions for image processing and workflow management were initially selected: VIP (CNRS, Lyon), MedInria (INRIA, Rennes) and BrainVisa (CEA, Paris-Saclay).

The IAM hub has set up a steering committee to define the priorities of action and the orientations of the node. A technical manager (Mr. Kain) supervised the developments carried out by a team of up to 15 software engineers distributed in six different centers. In order to respond as comprehensively as possible, three working groups were set up:

1. The first one dealt with interoperability issues, in particular interoperability between data repository solutions.
2. The second one dealt with image processing problems in order to provide versatile solutions for parallel or massive computing.
3. The last one worked on the transfer of the existing environment and expertise in the clinical imaging domain to the emerging preclinical imaging sector.

Since November 2020, the software platform is is operated by a temporary consortium of companies, selected after a tender. The provider offers a secure cloud environment for data management and processing in accordance with the RGPD regulation, based on the platform developed by IAM. The platform also enables the deployment of processing chains on high-performance computing systems to process large databases.

Laboratories involved in the hub :

INSERM U650 LaTIM, Neuroimagerie Fonctionnelle et de Perfusion (GIN Equipe Barbier, U1260 INSERM UGA), CREATIS, Empenn (U746), IADI U947), CIC CIT IT801, LSIIT/ICUBE, ICM, MIRCen, CRMBM.