The PASTRAMI project is a collaboration between the Inria Centre at Rennes University, CHU Rennes, CNRS and the Hôpital National d’Instruction des Armées Sainte-Anne. This is a collaborative project funded by the ANR (AAPG 2023), for the period 2024-2028.

 

 

Context

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) represents 1.5 million hospital admissions in the European Union (EU) each year and approximately 160,000 cases/year in France. Their causes are numerous: accidents, contact sports, military, etc. It is a leading cause of injury-related death (57,000 TBI-related deaths each year in the EU) and disability, with a devastating impact on patients and their families. It is therefore of paramount importance both from a clinical standpoint and from an ethical and societal standpoint to be able to accurately predict functional outcomes.

The PASTRAMI project proposes to promote the use of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to derive biomarkers of axonal injury along white matter (WM) fascicles as prognostic factors of functional recovery. Even though diffusion MRI, through the diffusion tensor model, has been successfully shown to correlate with functional outcome following TBI, this model of the diffusion provides sensitive yet non-specific biomarkers of tissue alterations.