Constantin Slioussarenko, an engineer by training, is a researcher in the NMR and Spectroscopy Laboratory, co-directed by Harmen Reyngoud and Benjamin Marty, at the Neuromuscular Investigation Center.
The team works on neuromuscular diseases that affect all the muscles in the body, and whose progression can be fairly heterogeneous, making it difficult to monitor their progress and the effect of treatments. The quantitative imaging technique provided by MRI is particularly interesting in this case, as it allows the whole body to be imaged non-invasively.
A muscle such as the diaphragm, which plays a vital role in breathing, measures just a few millimetres and moves continuously with breathing, which makes it difficult to observe (blurring, artefacts in the image, etc.). The team was thus able to “correct” the movement of this respiratory muscle using artificial intelligence algorithms, in order to quantify the fraction of fat and inflammation in the diaphragm and intercostal muscles, two interesting markers for monitoring the effects of treatments.
This is the first time that these two approaches have been combined: correcting movement and quantitatively evaluating respiratory muscles.
