Biomedical Engineering

Several research groups carry out research in the field of biomedical engineering. It involves the following activities summarized in more details below: Bioinformatics and computational biology, Biomedical data analysis, Biosensors, Medical Imaging, Modelling of biological and physiological systems.

Principal Investigators :

Pierre-Antoine Absil, Frédéric Crevecoeur, Benoit Delhaye, Pierre Dupont, Denis Flandre, Laurent Jacques, Sébastien Jodogne, Philippe Lefèvre, Benoit Macq, Michel Verleysen

Research Labs :

Machine Learning Group, INMA (Mathematical Engineering research division), Image and Signal Processing Group (ISPGroup)

Research Areas :

ICTEAM is involved in Transcriptomics and High-Throughput Technologies. This research activity focuses on the identification of biomarkers from gene expression data, as measured by high-throughput technologies such as high-density DNA microarrays or next generation sequencing platforms. These biomarkers may be used for medical diagnosis, prognosis or prediction of the response to a treatment. Our research objectives also include the link between transcriptomic data and functional analysis from a system biology viewpoint. Several collaborations exist on those topics with the UCLouvain Institute for Experimental and Clinical Research in the context of cancer research, allergy prediction among newborns and early diagnosis of arthritis.

Current projects also involve analysis and filtering of biomedical data and signals. It concerns a wide variety of applications based on the expert knowledge on data analysis and processing to the biomedical field:

  • analysis of biomedical signals (including ECG, EEG, etc.) for automatic pre-diagnosis
  • filtering of medical scan images for contour extraction

Several research projects aim at developing biosensors and biomedical applications of electronics:

  • application to monitoring of respiration (micro-systems)
  • low power systems for biomedical applications
  • security and cryptography for biomedical applications

ICTEAM pursues research on image processing tools and applications for the use in various medical contexts (radiotherapy, proton therapy, brachytherapy, surgery) and at different stages of treatment (planning, execution and follow-up). The research focuses on:

  • rigid and non-rigid image registrations methods for 2D-3D and 3D-3D images both for single and multiple modalities as well as for surfaces;
  • segmentation techniques either using prior knowledge (atlas-based) or allowing user interaction (graph cuts)
  • human-computer interactions to create intuitive user interfaces for the clinical world.

Another field of research is the solving of inverse problems from generalized sparsity prior (with applications in optics and X-ray CT), Compressed Sensing (theory and application), theoretical questions linked to the design of new sensors (for computer vision), applied mathematics for astronomical and biomedical signal processing questions, and representation of data on strange spaces (e.g., sphere, manifolds, or graphs). Besides, research is pursued on EEG reconstruction, transcranial magnetic stimulation, as well as on the use of functional imaging for measuring motion disorders.

The institute is also involved in shape analysis for protein docking. This includes 3D mesh processing and the analysis of protein surface properties.

ICTEAM also has research activities investigating the neural control movement. These activities are based on experimental, clinical and modelling approaches. Among the ongoing projects:

  • interaction between vision and the neural control of movement
  • experimental and modelling study of eye and head movements as well as eye-hand coordination
  • clinical studies: the influence of Duane Retraction Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy on vision and eye movements (St Luc Hospital and foundation JED).
  • dextrous manipulation in micro- and hyper-gravity (supported by Prodex and ESA)
  • the role of internal models: prediction and anticipation in smooth pursuit and saccade programming

As an illustration, get an insight into Prof. Philippe Lefèvre's research which combines space and physical experiences (in French - October 2022) :

Most recent publications

Below are listed the 10 most recent journal articles and conference papers produced in this research area. You also can access all publications by following this link : see all biomedical engineering publications


Journal Articles


1. Vanbrabant, Martin; Raskin, Jean-Pierre; Flandre, Denis; Kilchytska, Valeriya. Impact of thermal coupling effects on the digital and analog figures of merit of UTBB SOI MOSFET pairs. In: Solid - State Circuits, Vol. 2023, p. 108623 (2023). doi:10.1016/j.sse.2023.108623. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283154

2. Wuyckens, Sophie; Dasnoy-Sumell, Damien; Janssens, Guillaume; Hamaide, Valentin; Huet, Margerie; Loyen, Estelle; Macq, Benoît; Rotsart de Hertaing, Gauthier. OpenTPS -- Open-source treatment planning system for research in proton therapy. In: Medical Physics, (2023). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2303.00365. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283087

3. Loyen, Estelle; Dasnoy-Sumell, Damien; Macq, Benoît. Patient-specific three-dimensional image reconstruction from a single X-ray projection using a convolutional neural network for on-line radiotherapy applications. In: Physics and Imaging in Radiation Oncology, Vol. 26, p. 100444 (2023). doi:10.1016/j.phro.2023.100444. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283085

4. Kalidindi, Hari Teja; Crevecoeur, Frédéric. Human reaching control in dynamic environments. In: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Vol. 83, p. 102810 (2023). doi:10.1016/j.conb.2023.102810. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/280506

5. Córdova Bulens, David; du Bois de Dunilac, Sophie; Delhaye, Benoit; Lefèvre, Philippe; Redmond, Stephen J. Open-source instrumented object to study dexterous object manipulation. In: eNeuro, (2023). doi:10.1101/2023.10.20.563288 (Accepté/Sous presse). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/279788

6. Hoffmann, Anne; Crevecoeur, Frédéric. Task Instructions and the Need for Feedback Correction Influence the Contribution of Visual Errors to Reach Adaptation. In: eneuro, Vol. 10, no.9, p. ENEURO.0068-23.2023 (2023). doi:10.1523/eneuro.0068-23.2023. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/278768

7. Blondiaux, Florence; Lebrun, Louisien; Hanseeuw, Bernard; Crevecoeur, Frédéric. Impairments of saccadic and reaching adaptation in Essential Tremor are linked to movement execution. In: Journal of Neurophysiology, (2023). doi:10.1152/jn.00165.2023. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/278767

8. De Comite, Antoine; Lefèvre, Philippe; Crevecoeur, Frédéric. Continuous evaluation of cost-to-go for flexible reaching control and online decisions. In: PLoS Computational Biology, Vol. 19, no. 9, p. e1011493 (2023). doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011493. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/278222

9. Córdova Bulens, David; Cluff, Tyler; Blondeau, Laurent; Moore, Robert T.; Lefèvre, Philippe; Crevecoeur, Frédéric. Different Control Strategies Drive Interlimb Differences in Performance and Adaptation during Reaching Movements in Novel Dynamics. In: eneuro, Vol. 10, no.4, p. ENEURO.0275-22.2023 (2023). doi:10.1523/eneuro.0275-22.2023. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/278210

10. Jodogne, Sébastien. On the Use of WebAssembly for Rendering and Segmenting Medical Images. In: Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, Vol. 1814, no.1, p. 393-414 (2023). doi:10.1007/978-3-031-38854-5_20. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/277125


Conference Papers


1. Rotsart de Hertaing, Gauthier; Manjah, Dani; Macq, Benoît. TrajViViT: A Trajectory Video Vision Transformer Network for Trajectory Forecasting. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods ICPRAM - Volume 1, 2024, 978-989-758-684-2 xxx. doi:10.5220/0012372000003654. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/285748

2. Manjah, Dani; Galland, Stéphane; De Vleeschouwer, Christophe; Macq, Benoît. Autonomous Methods in Multisensor Architecture for Smart Surveillance. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART, 2024, 978-989-758-680-4 xxx. doi:10.5220/0012395700003636. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/285747

3. Pierard, Sébastien; Cioppa, Anthony; Halin, Anaïs; Vandeghen, Renaud; Zanella, Maxime; Macq, Benoît. Pushing AI out of the lab with on-the-fly mixture domain adaptation. 2023 xxx. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283086

4. Huet Dastarac, M.; Zhao, W.; Deffet, S.; Macq, Benoît. PO-1079 PARROT: An end-to-end open source workflow of AI-assisted treatment planning and decision support. In: Radiotherapy & Oncology. Vol. 182, p. S863-S864 (2023). Elsevier Ireland Ltd: Shannon, 2023 xxx. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283084

5. Rotsart de Hertaing, Gauthier; Dasnoy-Sumell, Damien; Janssens, Guillaume; Macq, Benoît. Online tumor motion forecasting using Vision Transformers. 2023 xxx. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283039

6. Berger, Alexandre; Beckers, Elise; Joris, Vincent; Duchêne, Vincent; Danthine, Venthia; Delinte, Nicolas; Macq, Benoît. Functional response of the locus coeruleus and integrity of its connections with the hippocampus are associated with vagus nerve stimulation response in drug-resistant epilepsy. 2023 xxx. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/282991

7. Manjah, Dani; Cacciarelli, Davide; Benkedadra, Mohamed; Standaert, Baptiste; Rotsart de Hertaing, Gauthier; Macq, Benoît; Galland, Stéphane; De Vleeschouwer, Christophe. Stream-Based Active Distillation for Scalable Model Deployment. In: 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023 xxx. doi:10.1109/CVPR52729.2023. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/281159

8. Fierens, Amaury; Gregoir, Thibault; Jodogne, Sébastien. Interoperable Encoding and 3D Printing of Anatomical Structures. In: ICBRA '23: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Applications. p. 20-26 (2023). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): New York, NY, USA, 2023 xxx. doi:10.1145/3632047.3632051. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/279236

9. Jodogne, Sébastien. Simple, effective deployment of Web viewers for medical imaging in an open platform. 2023 xxx. doi:https://doi.org/10.26226/m.64ae6f4f56241620f72a77cd. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/279234

10. Dessain, Quentin; Dricot, Laurence; Delinte, Nicolas; Daussort, Manon; Macq, Benoît; de Timary, Philippe; Kupers, Ron. Mood repair in long-term meditators is predicted by rsfMRI functional connectivity of the insula and correlates with FA of the uncinate fasciculus. 2023 xxx. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/275630