Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NextGenVis (Training the Next Generation of European Visual Neuroscientistsfor the benefit of innovation in health care and high-tech industry)

Teaser

Making sense of an ever-changing environment requires that the human visual system balance its stability and its ability to change and adapt. On the one hand, perceiving the visual world in a coherent way requires stability of the visual system. On the other hand, the ability...

Summary

Making sense of an ever-changing environment requires that the human visual system balance its stability and its ability to change and adapt. On the one hand, perceiving the visual world in a coherent way requires stability of the visual system. On the other hand, the ability to reorganize its neural processing may also be required to respond to changes in either the environment or even the system itself. The research carried out within the NextGenVis network focuses on the balance between cortical stability and plasticity in health and disease.

NextGenVis’ main goal is to train 15 young scientists in the field of cortical stability and plasticity. To achieve this, we brought together some of Europe’s leading scientists to train our fellows. Within NextGenVis, fellows are thus exposed to a wide variety of state-of-the-art technologies and use computational models to address the stability and plasticity of the visual system to find ways of exploiting research to improve the treatment and rehabilitation of patients and inspire the development and implementation of computer vision systems. NextGenVis consists of 10 beneficiaries and 5 associated partners representing 6 countries, and training 15 students of 10 nationalities.

To achieve the best possible training, we designed a high quality and highly complementary training program consisting of [1] secondments by doing research in at least two different labs and [2] a number of focused workshops, organized by the academic and industrial participants of the network and [3] Advanced Training Courses by experts working at the frontiers of clinical research and methods development. Our training program captures the multidisciplinary nature of NextGenVis’ participants while providing highly specialized training, as students all have an individual research project that exploits expertise of multiple participating labs. All students will visit at least one other lab and one of the private partners as part of their project. Furthermore, through focused courses and workshops organized at our hosting institutes and a strong social network, students have access to a wide variety of technologies and expertise throughout their training, which will yield a next generation of scientists that is well prepared for a career in science, either in industry or academia.

In addition to the Network general aims, we also defined a number of scientific aims to be addressed by our students:

• Neuroplasticity in various ophthalmic and neurological diseases
• Neuroplasticity at time-scales from seconds to years
• Deeper understanding of neuroplasticity at the level of neuronal populations
• New detailed brain analysis tools based on biological plausible models of brain activity
• Biomarkers for neurological disease
• Innovative adaptive vision algorithms for use in automatic recognition

Work performed

All ESRs have now started their individual research projects and some have already spent time in labs other than their primary hosts’ as part of their secondments. They have acquired and analysed behavioural, eye tracking and neuroimaging data from healthy and patient populations, or made progress creating computational models of the visual system. Furthermore, we organized focused courses [WP1-Training] on topics such as computational modelling of the visual system, the visual system in health and disease, scientific communication and outreach, and through visits to health care and industry sites such as the Royal Dutch Visio, Magdeburg Hospital and White Matter Labs, in addition to the courses that students took at their primary hosting institutes. In sum, NextGenVis has had a very successful start: management has successfully been implemented and training has started as scheduled and is already yielding very promising preliminary data. The ESRs are presenting their work at (inter)national meetings, contributing to various outreach events and benefitting from the multidisciplinary nature of NextGenVis evidenced by their mobility between NextGenVis labs already within the first year of their training.

Final results

Understanding cortical stability and plasticity in the human visual system is of significant scientific and clinical relevance. At one end of the spectrum, observers can learn to adapt to changes in visual context. At the other extreme, individuals may be faced with major and severe changes such ophthalmologic and neurodegenerative diseases. Will the architecture of the visual cortex remain the same or will it reorganize? There is also a rapid development of visual aids and restorative technologies such as retinal implants. In order to successfully apply these it is crucial to understand the visual system and how it responds to changes in visual input as a consequence of damage early on in the system. The NextGenVis researchers have been addressing these questions, all with a unique research angle.

NextGenVis’ members have disseminated the results of the research developed in the different labs through communication and transfer of knowledge to other research settings, namely through presentations at various types of scientific meetings and conferences, as well as presentations and events targeted at the general public.

Website & more info

More info: http://nextgenvis.eu/.