María José Carreira Nouche

I am a Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAI) at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), the coordinator of the area of CSAI, a member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Association of Shape Recognition and Image Analysis (AERFAI), and the academic secretary of the USC-Plexus Chair of AI applied to Personalized Precision Medicine (CAMELIA). I was previously deputy director of the School of Engineering (ETSE, 2008-2012), assistant to the Vice-Chancellor of Studies and Educational Innovation (2015-2017), and Rector's Commissioner for ICT Governance and Degree Strategy (2017-2018).

My research has always been focused on the field of intelligent medical image processing in different areas such as radiology, ophthalmology, oncology, neurology, dentistry, and paediatrics. I have participated in over 30 R&D&I projects and contracts in these areas of research, acting as a PI on over 15 projects and publishing over 90 scientific papers. These projects have resulted in the development of software such as ZFTool (oncology), ICBrain (neurology), and Dentius_Plaque, Dentius_Biofilm, and Dentius_Age (dentistry). Recently, I have been working on both ultrasound image analysis and studying the oral microbiome. In the latter area, we have developed PrimerEvalPy, a package for evaluating primers for oral microbiome analysis, and EpheClass, a package for evaluating genomic targets in microbial communities, which uses machine learning techniques to advance clinical metagenomics.

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I have participated in 30 research projects, contracts, and research design activities. I was the principal investigator in six of these activities, and nine were contracts/projects with companies. All my work is summarised in more than 90 scientific papers.

My research focuses on medical image intelligent processing, at first in radiographic chest images (PhD) and before my adhesion to CiTIUS, in ophthalmology. After joining CiTIUS, I worked on applications in oncology and neurology, collaborating with specialists from both disciplines. In the field of oncology, we developed a methodology for the 2D and 3D analysis of the evolution of cancer lines in zebrafish, publishing the ZFTool software. In the field of neurology, we developed the ICBrain software for the automatic measurement of tumour volumes in rats from resonance images.

I am currently working in the fields of Dentistry and Bioinformatics. In dentistry, we developed Dentius_Plaque and Dentius_Biofilm, two methodologies for the extraction and objective measurement of bacterial plaque at the macro (plaque) and microscopic (biofilm) level, as well as Dentius_Age for the calculation of dental age from panoramic dental radiographs using deep learning techniques. In bioinformatics, we are working on the development of PrimerEvalPy, a package for the evaluation of primers for analysis of the oral microbiome, and MicroMetaEvaluator, a package for the evaluation of genomic targets in microbial communities for the advancement in clinical metagenomics using machine learning techniques.