Brain Roads

The 3-day workshop »Brain Roads« took place from October 24th to 26th 2019 in the Central Laboratory of the Cluster. It had two main objectives: understand the formative process of current images of the brain model and define visual design issues.

Several questions emerged from this first phase: How to represent the degrees of uncertainty of the model? How to legitimately increase physician confidence when they look at these images? How to deliver all critical information during the most important part of surgery? How to build an intuitive, informative and coherent visual language at each scale of representation, from sub-millimetre voxel to macroscopic mapping? Can we propose more abstract diagrams of functional brain networks? Is it possible to propose radical aesthetic changes for these images, by convening other cultural references, while respecting the conventions in use today?

During the workshop several crucial issues in the process of presurgical analysis and intraoperative navigation were identified. Subsequently, a visual survey was conducted to identify graphic processing references that address these specific issues identified during the workshop.

In the near future graphic design students (ESAD de Reims) closely work together with software engineering students (Télécom SudParis - Institut polytechnique de Paris) in this interdisciplinary setting to develop visual representations and interactive research tools to analyse the white matter of the human brain before and during neurosurgery. Furthermore, with the use of different interdisciplinary perspectives, further derivatives will be initiated, which will expand the overall »Brain Roads« project.

Learn more about the research project and its participants