Professor Alejandro F Frangi
- Position: Diamond Jubilee Chair in Computational Medicine | Royal Academy
- Areas of expertise: computational medicine with emphasis on computational medical imaging, image-based biomechanics, machine learning, deep learning, big health data analytics
- Email: A.Frangi@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 9640
- Location: 2.23 Sir William H Bragg Building
- Website: My Personal Site | My Other Personal Site | Twitter | LinkedIn | Googlescholar | Researchgate | ORCID
Profile
Alejandro (Alex) was born in La Plata, Argentina. In 1991, he moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia (Barcelona) in 1996. Then he carried out research on electrical impedance tomography for image reconstruction and noise characterization at the same institution under a CIRIT grant. In 1997, he obtained a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs to pursue his PhD in Medicine at the Image Sciences Institute of the University Medical Center Utrecht on model-based cardiovascular image analysis. During this period, he was visiting researcher at the Imperial College in London, UK, and in Philips Medical Systems BV, The Netherlands.
Professor Frangi is Diamond Jubilee Chair in Computational Medicine and Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies at the University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, with joint appointments at the School of Computing and the School of Medicine. He directs the CISTIB Center for Computational Imaging and Simulation Technologies in Biomedicine. He is Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Prof Frangi is the Scientific Director of the Leeds Centre for HealthTech Innovation and Director of Research and Innovation of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.
Professor Frangi has edited several books, published 7 editorial articles, and over 260 journal papers in key international journals of his research field, and more than 200 book chapters and international conference papers with an h-index of 67 and over 27,500 citations, according to Google Scholar. He has been three times Guest Editor of special issues of IEEE Trans Med Imaging, one on IEEE Trans Biomed Eng, and one of Medical Image Analysis journals. He was chair of the 3rd International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modelling of the Heart (FIMH05) held in Barcelona in June 2005, Publications Chair of the IEEE International Symposium in Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2006), Programme Committee Member of various editions of the Intl Conf on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) (Brisbane, AU, 2007; Beijing CN, 2010; Toronto CA 2011; Nice FR 2012; Nagoya JP 2013), International Liaison of ISBI 2009, Tutorials Co-Chair of MICCAI 2010, and Program Co-chair of MICCAI 2010, and General Chair for ISBI 2012 held in Barcelona. He is the General Chair of MICCAI 2018 to be held in Granada, Spain.
Professor Frangi is Chair of the Editorial Board of the MICCAI-Elsevier Book Series (2017-2020) and is Associate Editor of IEEE Trans on Medical Imaging, Medical Image Analysis, SIAM Journal Imaging Sciences, Computer Vision and Image Understanding journals. Professor Frangi was a foreign member of the Review College of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, 2006-10) in the UK. He is a recipient of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Early Career Award (2006) and the IEEE EMBS Technical Achievement Award (2021), the ICT Knowledge Transfer Prize (2008) and two Teaching Excellence Prizes (2008, 2010) by the Social Council of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He also received the UPF Medal (2011) for his service as Dean of the Escuela Politècnica Superior. He was awarded the ICREA-Academia Prize by the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) in 2008. Professor Frangi is an IEEE Fellow (2014), MICCAI Fellow (2021), SPIE Fellow (2020), EAMBES Fellow (2013), SIAM Member, and elected member of the Board of Directors of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) Society (2014-2018). Professor Frangi serves in the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research (EIBIR) and was Chair of the Fellows Committee of the IEEE EMBS (2017-2018).
Responsibilities
- Director of CISTIB Centre for Computational Imaging & Simulation Technologies in Biomedicine
- Scientific Director Leeds Centre for HealthTech Innovation
- Director of Research & Innovation Leeds Institute for Data Analytics
Research interests
Professor Frangi's main research interests lie at the crossroads of medical image analysis and modeling with emphasis on machine learning (phenomenological models) and computational physiology (mechanistic models). He has particular interest in statistical methods applied to population imaging and in silico clinical trials. His highly interdisciplinary work has been translated to cardiovascular, musculoskeletal and neurosciences.
He has been principal investigator or scientific coordinator of over 25 national and European projects, both funded by public and private bodies. During 1/2006-3/2010 he was coordinator of the @neurIST: Integrated Biomedical Informatics for the Management of Cerebral Aneurysms, a 12.6M€ European Integrated Project, during 1/2006-12/2009 he was scientific co-PI for the Spanish CENIT Technology Platform CDTEAM funded with 15.7M€ by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through CDTI, in 2009-2012 he participated of the euHeart Integrated Project, in 2009-2012 in the Virtual Physiological Human Network of Excellence, and in 2009-2012 he was Scientific Coordinator of the CENIT Technology Platform cvREMOD funded with 13.6M€ by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through CDTI. He coordinates the € 13.3m-Integrated Project funded by the European Commission entitled VPH-DARE@IT DementiA Research Enabled by IT, led by CISTIB and involving other 19 European organizations. He was awarded a £ 1.3m grant as Principal Investigator from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the project OCEAN: One-stop-shop Microstructure-sensitive Perfusion/Diffusion MRI: Application to Vascular Cognitive Impairment. He is also one of the 5 co-investigators in the recently awarded EPSRC-NIHR HTC Partnership Award 'Plus': Medical Image Analysis Network (MedIAN) led by Oxford.
Under his leadership, CISTIB develops GIMIAS (Graphical Interface for Medical Image Analysis and Simulation, an open-source platform for rapidly developing pre-commercial software prototypes in image computing and image-based computational physiology modelling, and MULTI-X (Health Data Analytics and Modelling As a Service Platform), a cloud-based platform for computational phenomics, in silico medicine, and in silico clinical trials. The research and development conducted in his research group led to two spin-off companies, Clintelis SA in 2009 and GalgoMedical SA (www.galgomedical.com) in 2013.
Qualifications
- BSc/MSc Telecommunications Engineering, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 1996, Barcelona, Spain
- PhD Imaging Sciences, Utrecht University, 2001, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Professional memberships
- IEEE Fellow
- SPIE Fellow
- MICCAI Fellow
- EAMBES Fellow
- SIAM Member
- IET Member
- Turing Fellow
Student education
At the moment I do not have teaching commitments at undergraduate level but am intensively supervising MSc and PhD students at the School of Computing and at the School of Medicine in the areas of computational imaging and computational biomechanics with particular interest in cardiovascular, metabolic and bone disease. I am interested in working with motivated students to solve unmet clinical needs in medicine by utilising novel computational medicine methods. I work both with students willing to develop fundamental algorithms in computational imaging, machine learning and computational mechanics as well as with students seeking to translate these methods to the clinical setting. To this end, my lab has two bases, one at the School of Computing (Faculty of Engineering) and one at the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine (Faculty of Medicine and Health) both at the University of Leeds. You can check out the work of my former PhD students at http://www.cistib.org/afrangi/alumni and my publications at www.cistib.org/afrangi/publications or my GoogleScholar profile https://tinyurl.com/affrangi.
Research groups and institutes
- Computing in Biology, Medicine and Health
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computational Science and Engineering
- Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering
- Robotics
- Computational Medicine
- Institute of Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Sensing
Current postgraduate researchers
- Rodrigo Bonazzola
- Mr. Xiang Chen
- Mojtaba Lashgari
- Michael MacRaild
- Fergus Shone
- Nurbanu Aksoy
- Haoran Dou
- Nina Cheng
- Cynthia Maldonado