French Interuniversity 3-Minute Thesis Final 2025

How plants harness rain and how we can do it too?

Plants have developed various strategies to ensure reproduction and propagate their progeny. Flowering plants may use insects or wind to spread seeds and pollen, or fruit-eating animals to disperse seeds. Rain plays a major role in the reproduction of some other plants. These last ones develop small, cup-shaped structures known as splash-cups on their upper surface. Within these cups, they house their reproductive units. Upon the impact of a raindrop with the splash- cup the units are ejected away from the parent plant and the likelihood of successful colonization in a new location is increased.

We study the splash-cup dispersal mechanism and we investigate the relationship between splash-cup geometry and the resulting hydrodynamic behavior during drop impact.

Real-time Polarimetric Imaging For Brain Tumor Surgery

Surgery remains the key step in treating most patients with brain tumors. 

Clearly identifying the tumor is very important to remove it effectively while preserving brain function. However, during surgery, it is often difficult to tell the difference between tumor tissue and surrounding healthy brain tissue due to poor visual contrast. 

Nevertheless, there is a noticeable structural difference between healthy brain tissue and brain tumors. Healthy brain tissue contains nerve fibers that are densely packed and well-organized, while tumor cells grow randomly and disrupt this organized structure. It has been shown that the organized patterns in healthy brain tissue can be highlighted using wide-field polarimetric imaging techniques. 

Our research focuses on speeding up both image acquisition and post- processing, as well as improving existing machine learning algorithms to improve the segmentation accuracy.