Rui Bernardes

Rui Bernardes

Keynote Speaker

Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra (Institute of Biophysics and Biomathematics), Portugal.
His background consists in a Licensure in Electrical Engineering, a Master degree in Biomedical Engineering and a PhD degree in Health Sciences. He works for over 10 years in diabetic retinopathy, developing imaging modalities as the Retinal Leakage Analyser (RLA), a functional imaging system for measuring the permeability of the blood-retinal barrier (BRB), in vivo, and on Multimodal Macula Mapping (MMM), the integration of different imaging modalities to establish relations between different parameters, either morphologic or functional ones, from the human retina.
His contributions led already to the establishment of phenotypes of progression of diabetic retinopathy, and a risk marker for the development of diabetic retinopathy to CSME eyes needing photocoagulation based on the fusion of structure and function data.
He also contributed actively to the development of a quantization process of fluorescence of sodium fluorescein in the human eye, both in serum and vitreous, being this work patented (“Method and apparatus for measuring quantity of a fluorochrome in a biological environment.”. World Intellectual Property Organization. WO 2008/067525 A2, July 5, 2008).
He has been contributing to several national research projects, funded by the national “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)”, as well as in European research projects like the GLAUCAD (Glaucoma Prevention by Computer Aided Diagnostics), EVIGeM (European Virtual Institute for Geometry Measurements) and EVI-GENORET (European Vision Institute – Functional Genomics of the Retina in Health and Disease).
Collaborations with industry include companies as Pfizer Inc. (Groton, CT, USA), Carl Zeiss Meditec (Dublin, CA, USA), Thermofisher (Portsmouth, NH, USA) and Critical Software (Coimbra, Portugal).

Abstract

Over 75 million people are expected to live with dementia in 2030 according to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) made in 2015. Alzheimer’s disease alone is estimated to represent 60% to 80% of the cases.
Imaging the brain is not cheap or possible to this number of people, let alone for population screening. In consequence, an increasing number of research groups adopted the approach of using the retina as a window to the brain. Besides being the visible part of the central nervous system, the retina is readily available through non-invasive imaging techniques. Moreover, there is cumulative evidence indicating that the retina can also be affected by neurodegenerative diseases.
This talk will cover historical and state-of-the-art developments in one of the techniques toward ocular imaging with the highest impact in the last decades, the optical coherence tomography (OCT). It will show the course of innovation since the coarse retinal imaging to the application of imaging the central nervous system, in situ and in vivo, with the ability to potentially shed light on neurodegenerative disorders.
Recent advances using human data and data from animal models of Alzheimer’s disease show the parallel concerning the natural history of disease progression. The development of biomarkers of disease and disease progression and the use of machine learning approaches towards the identification of individuals within asymptomatic stages of neurodegeneration and the differences to the healthy aging will be discussed.