Listen to the silence...

Elodie André has shown by means of her study that it was important to pay attention to the noise that influences final results, but she plans to go further. "It is easy to implement our correction method which is now used routinely at the Cyclotron Research Centre. The objective is to share it more widely so that everyone can use it." To succeed in this objective, in collaboration with other laboratories (in London and Lausanne), a toolbox is under development.  Its implementation should allow every department using MRI technology to make use of the method, and therefore to benefit from an optimal and shared noise correction technique without the need to be a physicist. 

Sharing optimal resources is the key solution to one of the current difficulties: in the absence of a shared state-of-the-art method, each group produces “local” results, depending on local data acquisition procedures and local data processing techniques, making it impossible to compare results obtained by the different group. "By sharing optimal methods, it would be possible to compare and even combine results from different laboratories more easily", argues Elodie André.

“We have on the one hand, engineers and physicists implementing and developing computer tools to get the best results from the technologies available for medical applications, and on the other hand, medical doctors with high practical expertise, basing their diagnosis on the visual analysis of images. Often one side seems completely opaque to the other. How many doctors do computer programming? How many physicists can recognize the corpus callosum or the substantia nigra? And yet, their interaction is indispensable. For example, the tool developed by the former to control image quality, will be based on the expertise of the latter to avoid any confusion between artefacts and real pathology. Interactions in multidisciplinary fields are essential!

Unfortunately, in hospitals, due to lack of time and means, little time is devoted to the adjustment of procedures and the training of medical teams for the use of tools developed by research teams. As a result, complex equipment can be underused, while outdated procedures keep being used routinely. It is true that these procedures and the expertise of medical doctors make it possible to rapidly produce a correct diagnosis. However, physicists, thanks to the support they can provide to medical teams, still have a bright future, reducing misinterpretation related to human errors, improving the reproducibility and the reliability of results, fully taking advantage of available techniques and using new ones as soon as they become available”