Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique

Dr. Alexandre Vignaud, born March 30th 1974, received his PhD in 200. The topic was the “Influence of the magnetic field strength on in-vivo hyperpolarized helium-3 MR imaging” at the University of Paris South. Between 2003 and 2005, he was a 2-year visiting post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, in LCE research unit at NHLBI. The topic was the development of new cardiac MR applications using intravascular superparamagnetic contrast agents. After this experience, between 2005 and 2010, he joined Siemens Healthcare, France as a Clinical Scientist, first to help customers develop new clinical MR applications. In 2010, he became ultra-high field MRI scientific development manager supervising partnership with customers using 3T and beyond for research purposes only.
Since 2012, he has been a permanent researcher in CEA in NeuroSpin as 7T system manager, developing UHF MRI compatible methodologies. In the last past 10 years, he has been involved in more than 34 refereed international journal papers on MR methodology, and 40 international conference abstracts. For his last year in 2012 at Siemens, he was in the top 10 abstract co-authors for Siemens Healthcare worldwide at the ISMRM conference, the major event in the MRI methodological field.
Alexandre Vignaud’s contribution will take place mainly in the WP 6 and 7. He will help to adapt the coil to Siemens systems, produce certification and paperwork to make them approved by the legal authorities. He will manage the acquisitions to evaluate new coil concept in vivo. He will analyse the results of the study and write article on MR applications of the findings.

Dr. Cécile Rabrait-Lerman, is a former student from “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon” and an expert in Magnetic Resonance Pulse Sequence Development and Neuroimaging. After obtaining the “Agrégation de Sciences Physiques” in 2003, she received her PhD in 2007 from University Paris XI for her work on cerebral functional imaging at high temporal resolution under the supervision of Denis Le Bihan and Franck Lethimonnier at the Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot (CEA). After working for Philips Healthcare in the MRI R&D Department in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) and for GE Healthcare as a MRI Clinical Scientist for France, she joined NeuroSpin in 2013 as a Researcher and System Manager of the future 11.7T clinical MR scanner. In M-CUBE project, she will study potential applicability of the findings at 11.7T.

Dr. Lucie Hertz-Pannier is a Medical Doctor since 1987 and she has been awarded with a PhD in 1998. She has been a NIH fellow during 3 years. She is specialized on pediatric neuroradiology. She has a huge experience of clinical trials on child and adult. She has been involved in more than 66 refereed international journal papers including a Science paper in 2002. She is now the director of UNIACT. The laboratory leads clinical project on NeuroSpin’s platform. She represents the guarantee that final in vivo experiments will be carried on into the ethical and safety guidelines.

Dr. Denis Le Bihan is the director of NeuroSpin. He is member of the French Academy of Sciences. Physicist and physician specialized in neuroradiology, he has made outstanding contributions during the past fifteen years, the development of new imaging concepts magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including diffusion imaging. He implemented these new concepts as essential tools to explore the functioning of normal and pathological brain, and to contribute to medical applications in the field of diagnostics and therapeutics. Author of over 200 publications and a member of numerous scientific committees, Denis Le Bihan is a great researcher acknowledged internationally. For his work, he has received the 2001 Gold Medal of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and in 2002 the Lounsbery French price and US Academies of Science price.
In 2003 he was awarded with the price Stanislas Dehaene of the Louis D. Foundation of the Institute of France.

Luisa Ciobanu, PhD received her doctorate in physics from the Ohio State University and has held research appointments at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Pfizer, Inc. In 2007, she joined NeuroSpin at CEA-Saclay, France, where she heads the NeuroPhysics team. Her primary research interests include magnetic resonance microscopy and its application to neuroscience investigations, as well as the development of novel functional MRI techniques for ultra-high magnetic field imaging.

Dr Benoit Larrat is a french physicist working at CEA NeuroSpin in Saclay, France. His expertise is both in MRI and ultrasound since he develops applications mixing these two modalities. His current main research topic is related to drug delivery to the brain thank to MR guided focused ultrasound. Before joining CEA, he met J de Rosny and R Abdeddaim at Institut Langevin, Paris, France. At that time, they realized that metamaterial properties could be of great interest in MRI and they made a first proof of concept that was also patented. From this early work in 2011, the project was expanded and improved by the participation of many new partners and finally received the FET-Open grant in 2016.

Dr Caroline Le Ster defended her PhD in Medical and Biological engineering at Rennes University, France, in 2017. She is currently postdoctoral fellow at Neurospin, CEA (France).

Alexis Amadon got an engineering degree from INPG/ENSIEG (1988), a M.Sc. in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University (1989), a PhD in High Energy Physics (1995) and a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches from Paris-Saclay University (2015 - MRI specialty).
In the early 90’s, A. Amadon worked in an IT service company (Steria) before his doctoral studies in high-energy physics. He has been a research engineer at CEA since 1995, and has published in the fields of aerosol physics (1990), nuclear instrumentation (1995), particle physics (postdoc at the University of Chicago in 1995-97) and observational cosmology (1998-99). He was co-founder and technical manager of a multi-media startup (2000-02: Wiziway, creating the first paper hyperlink reader). Subsequently he embarked on a career in MRI methodology in 2003, first at Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot (Orsay), then became one of the pioneers of NeuroSpin right from 2006. Since then he has specialized in the fight against MRI artifacts arising from high magnetic fields and related to static (B0) and RF (B1) inhomogeneities, in particular with parallel transmission. Author of about fifty publications in the field, he is the main inventor of the kT-points© transmission technology, which has just been licensed by CEA to Siemens Healthcare. He was also system manager of NeuroSpin's 3-Tesla imager for more than 10 years (2008-19), during which he has worked with neuroscientists whose needs he knows well. He is now in charge of NeuroSpin's Instrumentation R&D team, after obtaining grants for the development of parallel transmission coils and B0-shim inserts.
My contribution in M-Cube consisted in providing home-made MRI acquisition sequences and training for the measurement of RF excitation field maps, relevant for the evaluation of B1-homogenization strategies.