Rubén Cárdenes Almeida is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated to PhySense, at the Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DTIC), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, and to the Fetal and Perinatal Medicine Research Group, IDIBAPS, Hospital Clinic de Barcelona.

He received his M.S. degree in physics from the University of Zaragoza in 1998, and he received his PhD degree in 2004 from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), at the Telecommunication Engineering School. He has been teaching and working in several research projects in the Center for Technology in Medicine, ULPGC, in the Laboratory of Image Processing (LPI), University of Valladolid, and at CISTIB, DTIC, UPF. He has also collaborated with the Surgical Planning Lab (SPL), at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, where he has been invited researcher.

Research lines

His research lines have been devoted to medical image processing and analysis, especially from bran MRI and from X-ray, CTA, 3DRA to model and analyze vessels. Some of the technical skills he is specialized on are: segmentation and classification of structures, feature detection, feature tracking, shape analysis, 3D reconstruction from projections, filtering, statistical analysis and advanced visualization.

He is specialized in discrete computational geometry techniques, like computation of distance transforms, skeletons, medial surfaces, Voronoi diagrams, calculus of geodesics and fast marching among others. All these skills are summarized in the CV, with 16 journal publications and more than 40 conference papers, already published in this field.

Ongoing research

Rubén Cárdenes is currently visiting the BESSY II synchrotron at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, under the supervision of Dr. Gerd Schneider to collaborate with the microscopy group, by applying advanced imaging techniques on soft X-ray microscopy, and to learn the acquisition details and inherent advantages and drawbacks of this modality. He is also interested and working on other microscopy techniques like transmission electron microscopy and multi-photon microscopy to fill the gap between different resolutions and to be able to analyze cellular structures at different scales.

Currently there are several activities where he is involved at PhySense and Hospital Clinic, related to microscopy image analysis:

• Analysis of the cell membrane under the influence of beta peptide, from soft X-ray microscopy.

• Description of the microscopic structure of cardiac tissue from multi-photon microscopy.

• Analysis of myocytes cell structure and sub-structures from TEM and soft X-ray microscopy.