Tuesday 19th November 2024, 2pm UK time, online & in person, LT in Marlowe Building, University of Kent, UK, visit by Prof. Olga M. Conde Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Cantabria
Tuesday 19th November 2024 Prof. Olga M. Conde visited Applied Optics Group (AOG) and delivered a presentation online & in person with the title “Advanced Optical Imaging for Diagnosis in Precision Medicine Techniques and Applications”, LT in Marlowe Building, University of Kent. Before and after the presentation Prof. conde visited the AOG’s labs and had the opportunity to meet and discuss with NETLAS ESRs, PhD Students and Researchers about their research interests and results.
Prof. Conde said: “Honored to visit and be invited to the University of Kent within the N NETLAS Doctoral School! 🌟
Thanks to Prof Adrian Podoleanu and the team for the warm welcome and the opportunity to catch up. Eager for more collaborations and learning!”
ABSTRACT:
Advanced optical imaging technologies including HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI), Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), Polarization Sensitive-OCT (PS-OCT), Raman spectroscopy and Mueller polarimetry, provide valuable and rich chemical and morphological information about biological tissues. Optical imaging technologies help clinicians to assess the evolution and diagnosis tissue impairment while performing surgery, pathological assessment, diagnosis, etc. Under this perspective, the adoption of optical imaging techniques within the biomedical field will enhance CADe (Computer-Aided Detection) and CADx (Computer-Aided Diagnosis) disciplines. Tissue composition changes qualitatively and quantitatively during the evolution of a disease. Understanding the physics of light-tissue interaction mechanisms helps to obtain accurate optical properties (absorption and scattering coefficients, birefringence, anisotropy, etc.) that can be used for diagnosis. In general, and due to the heterogeneity of tissues, this problem is affected by a multiparametric scenario that cannot be always addressed by deterministic or empirical approaches.
Our research is focused both, in the development of optical imaging technologies to extract optical properties from tissue, and on the development of automated classification methods for biological tissue diagnosis based on statistical, multivariate methods and artificial intelligence including deep-learning methods.
These general computational methodologies, aimed to discover unknown and hidden relationships between input and output data, can be transversally transferred to different modalities. Results of this approach cover from cardiovascular diseases to the early assessment of neuromuscular diseases or the determination of margin assessment in cancer, among others.
BIOGRAPHY:
Olga M. Conde Ms and Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Cantabria. Associate Professor since 1999 in the Photonics Engineering Group of the University of Cantabria and associated researcher of IDIVAL (Marqués de Valdecilla Biomedical Research Institute) and CIBER-BBN (Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine Networking Biomedical Research Centre).
Her research interests are focused in medical imaging techniques for tumour delineation (breast, melanoma, pancreas, glioma) and diagnosis of cardiovascular pathologies (aneurysm, hearth valve repair surgery) and rare diseases along with the imaging of physico-chemical properties of organoids;
the development of artificial intelligence (pattern and features recognition techniques, spectral analysis, etc.) applied to artificial vision and imaging spectroscopy for biomedical, agri-food and industrial environments;
and the development of spectroscopic/hyperspectral imaging systems for materials in the visible, NIR and SWIR ranges.
Her research is funded by the Institute of Health Carlos III and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness publishing over 50 peer-reviewed papers and over 180 conference papers. She is Vice President of the Imaging Techniques Committee of SEDOPTICA (Spanish Optical Society), Associate Editor of JBO (Journal of Biomedical Optics, SPIE), member of the TPC (Technical Program Committee) and IAB (International Advisory Board) of different conferences (SPIE, OSA, IEEE, LALS) and reviewer of evaluation agencies ANEP (Spanish National Agency for Evaluation and Forecasting) and FNRS (Belgium Fund for Scientific Research) and different scientific journals.