Cyril POUPON

After obtaining an engineering diploma in electronics (signal and image processing section) from the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon as well as a Master in Image Processing from the CREATIS research laboratory (Lyon), Cyril Poupon completed a PhD in Image Processing from Telecom ParisTech at the Frédéric Joliot Hospital Service (CEA, Orsay).

His research was focused on the development of one of the first methods allowing to map in vivo the structural connectivity of the human brain from diffusion-weighted MRI data, contributing to better understand the human brain connectome.

After a period of three years working for General Electric HealthCare (2000-2002) as a research engineer in charge of the development of the Functool software dedicated to the analysis of MRI data, Cyril Poupon joined the CEA in 2002 with a position of MR physicist at the Frédéric Joliot Hospital Service. Then, he moved to Neurospin in 2007 to successively occupy a position of MR physicist in the laboratory of MRI and Spectroscopy and a position of expert in image processing in the laboratory of Image Analysis.

In 2010, Cyril Poupon took the position of director of the laboratory of MRI and Spectroscopy of Neurospin, co-leading the two following transverse research programs: “Pushing the limits of MRI” targeting the development with his team of ultra-high field imaging methods and “Multiscale Human Brain Architecture” modeling the human brain at various scales, and developing in particular methods to map the human brain structural connectome and tissue microstructure.

To this aim, Cyril Poupon led the developments of a software platform dedicated to diffusion MRI analysis, Connectomist, that allows to map and analyze the structure of brain white matter bundles, but also to map the microstructure of brain tissues using advanced biophysical models providing quantitative features characterizing the various cell species populating brain tissues to define novel microstructural imaging biomarkers of  parenchyma.

In the frame of the TRT_cSVD RHU project, the team of Cyril Poupon will develop novel preclinical and clinical imaging protocols as well as dedicated image analysis pipelines for quantitative and diffusion MRI in order to establish quantitative features characterizing the brain microstructure and microvaculature to better understand and follow their alterations at cellular scales during the progression of small vessel diseases.

In the frame of the RHU project also, Cyril Poupon and Hugues Chabriat recently obtained a grant, funded by the Leducq Foundation, in order to equip the clinical 7T MRI system of Neurospin of the latest technological innovations that will allow to develop a specific research program aiming at using ultra-high magnetic fields to explore small vessel diseases.