BU Research Blog

My name is Adrian Galdran, and I was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Data Science for Medical Imaging last November, in the context of BU’s Academic Targeted Research Scheme. Although I am particularly interested in medical image analysis, I have a broad interest in medical data taking any shape and nature, be it text, imaging, video, or even big tables filled with numbers!

I have been working on computer vision with medical applications for a while now. After earning my PhD in the Basque Country University (northern Spain), I headed to the beautiful Porto, where I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at INESC-TEC. In those years I focused a lot on the automatic analysis of images of the eye fundus. These are images acquired by projecting light into the back of the eye and capturing a picture of the retina, and they are useful for the early detection of diseases like Diabetic Retinopathy or Age-Related Diabetic Maculopathy.

An image of the eye fundus – the retina

When a person suffers from this kind of diabetes, retinal vessels start to hemorrhage and leak blood into the retina, which at first starts as micro-aneurysms, but later develops into larger lesions and leads to sight-threatening situations. I find it fascinating that we can diagnose diseases like diabetes by looking into the human retina.

After my stay in Portugal, I moved for a second postdoctoral experience to Montréal, Canada, where I worked on deep learning for medical image classification and segmentation, again with a focus on retinal imaging. I spent one year in Canada, with its rough winter and a wonderful summer. It was then that I received the offer to pursue my research within BU, in the context of the new Medical Imaging and Visualisation Institute (IMIV). I am very excited to collaborate with this new institution, which houses an MRI scanner and ultrasound devices. I expect that the privilege of having access to these advanced facilities will trigger research in medical image analysis at BU, and I am hoping to be part of it.

If you are interested in collaborating in any aspect of medical image analysis, please contact me to discuss any common project we may build.