This year, the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) has celebrated the 31st edition here in Barcelona. This is an annual Multiple Sclerosis international conference where all the biggest research groups from both medical and image research fields show up, thus it makes this event an perfect place to do networking, learn which are the latest news on the topic, and obviously promote the latest contributions of the research to the society.
The brain medical image team in VICOROB has attended it with a great participation, presenting four posters with the results of the latest research in the field. Eloy Roura presented his work on the detection and segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis lesion using only two magnetic resonance imaging modalities. Related to that, Sergi Valverde showed the results of a recent study about the effect of manual or automated lesion annotations on the computation of white matter and gray matter tissue employing different existing techniques. Finally, Mariano Cabezas was presenting both an automated approach to detect new lesions from serial brain images, and also a recent study about the effect of employing subtraction imaging for the detection of new lesions using both semiautomatic and fully automatic approaches.
The conference is also a great place to meet new companies focused on imaging, who basically perform statistical summaries required by the clinicians when diagnosing and monitoring disease progression. These companies analyse MRI directly achieved from the scanner and gather a set of biomarkers in order to describe the disease. These processes are actually the work which is carried out in the lab, and the fact that this is such interesting issue is a clear inspiration to keep working hard on developing useful tools improving the current state of the art.
