photographist

"I look at the brain’s grey matter and the internal connections which are the white matter. We are seeking to identify differences between sick subjects and people in good health. I studied information technology in Argentina before coming to France to do research into brain imaging. It is very interesting to study IT because it can be used in a variety of fields. The subject of my thesis is to create a software application that compares the brain images of different subjects, in order to analyse and compare the brain’s internal structures. I work with anatomical and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Anatomical imaging is the best known, where you can see the grey matter (the cortex) and the white matter (the interior). In diffusion imaging, you can watch the movements of water molecules in the brain, in order to rebuild the internal connections.

Today, I am working at Inria on medical software which could be used in hospitals. Inria is well known in Argentina and I knew they did good IT research in medical imaging. I am very pleased to have been accepted as a PhD student. The research is very stimulating on a daily basis because we believe in what we do. But you also need to be very patient, because things don’t work all the time. In brain research, there are various specialisms; there are IT specialists on my team, but we work alongside mathematicians, psychologists and doctors. I am the only woman and would like there to be more of us! I spend my entire time in front of a computer screen, noting down new ideas for which new mathematical models need creating, programming and testing my software, analysing images with what I have programmed, or reading and writing articles."

Viviana Siless
PhD student, Parietal - Inria

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