Our research is at the intersection of life and computational sciences, with a main focus on biological processes that evolve over time such as cell migration and disease dynamics.
We are distributed between the Theodor Kocher Institute , Faculty of Medicine, University of Bern with an experimental component focused on live cell imaging, and the MeDiTech institute, SUPSI - Lugano with a dry lab component focused on biomedical image analysis.
We are also affiliated with the Euler institute of USI (where the lab was originally esablished in 2022) and the International Center for Advanced Computing in Medicine (ICAM) of University of Pavia - Italy, hosting visiting students and offering joint theses.
We promote cross-contamination between different fields, the development of interdisciplinary researchers, and actively support Open Science – see the IMMUNEMAP project.
Competences:
🧬 Bio: immunopathology, immune cell migration, chemotaxis, electrophysiology, in vivo & in vitro microscopy
🩺 Med: personalized modelling, disease dynamics, wearables, ECG & biosignal processing, CT/MRI/ultrasound analysis
💻 Tech: computer vision, motility analysis, machine learning, network theory, software development, hardware prototyping.
💡 Motto: More data make performance better; Less data make researchers smarter.
WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
The group will be relocated between the MeDiTech Institute of SUPSI - Lugano with a focus on Biomedical Image Analysis and Pathophysiology, and the Theodor Kocher Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Bern, with a wet-lab component focused on cell migration and preclinical imaging.
Systematic analysis of immune cell motility leveraging the open intravital microscopy database Immunemap
Pizzagalli DU & Carrillo-Barbera P et al.
EMBO Journal
Link
Tobia is born!
Supported by SNSF we are looking for a research assistant willing to engage in an interdisciplinary project at the forefront of immunology, imaging, and engineering to modulate the extravasation of inflammatory cells through the blood brain barrier (BBB) using electric stimulation.
Principal Investigator, directing the lab since 2022. Diego has a mixed training in Computer Engineering and Medicine and actively promotes the training or interdisciplinary researchers. After a PhD supported by SystemsX - the Swiss Initiative in Systems Biology - in which he studied the behavior of immune cells in vivo, he translated trajectory analysis methods to other domains including wearables and disease dynamics.He is founder and co-director of the IMMUNEMAP project. Diego's engineering side has a passion for microcontrollers, old algorithms, and network theory. Diego's medical side has a passion for heart electrophysiology and immune-mediated disorders. He teaches subjects related to cell migration, signal processing and biomedical data analysis. Diego serves as guest editor at Frontiers in Immunology, MDPI Applied Sciences, and committe member at the International Center for Advanced Computing in Medicine - Pavia.
Ali is a visiting professor with extensive expertise in computer vision for multimodal biomedical image analysis.
Charlotte studied Biomedical Engineering at University of Pavia and is currently investigating immune cell extravasation in neuroinflammation, using a blood-brain-barrier on-chip model and computer vision methods for analyzing cytoskeleton remodelling.
Raffaella obtained a PhD in Computational Mathematics and Decision Sciences at University of Pavia, which included a visiting period at USI. Her studies concern the design and implementation of algorithms and computational techniques for biomedical image processing and clinical data interpretation. Furthermore, she actively contributes to the dissemination and application of these techniques by participating in the organization of challenges that encourage the exploration of Open Science principles and aim to facilitate collaboration among researchers. Raffaella is also a committe member at the International Center for Advanced Computing in Medicine - Pavia.
Giulia has a background in Medical Biotechnology from University of Camerino, and a passion for microbiology, virology and immunology. She is responsible for live cell imaging of electro-immune interactions. In collab. with the group of Prof. Engelhardt, Giulia is studying the extravasation of inflammatory immune cells in the CNS.
Mariaclaudia has a pharmaceutical background with a strong interest in applying computational research methods. Her research focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) by leveraging scientific discoveries in the laboratory and transforming them into new treatment approaches to improve healthcare. As a research assistant at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Mariaclaudia applies language models used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that determine which word is more likely to appear next in the sentence to find machine learning-based solutions for microscopy data analysis for the IMMUNEMAP project.
Enrico studied Engineering of Computing Systems at Politecnico di Milano. He is the main programmer and IT infrastructure manager for IMMUNEMAP, responsible for developing and maintaining the platform's robust functionalities. This involves creating intuitive user interfaces, implementing data storage and retrieval mechanisms, and ensuring the smooth functioning of the entire infrastructure.
Farah is a PhD Student in Computational Mathematics and DecisionSciences at UniPV. She is spending her mobility period at USI where shw will contribute to the development of unsupervised learning methods for time-series analysis and explainable AI.
Lala is a visiting PhD in Physiology from U. Cagliari. During her stay she will develop and apply machine learning methods for the analysis of fungiform papillae.
An open atlas and computational framework for studying immune-cell dynamics from intravital microscopy.
Visit project →Elucidating electrically mediated interactions during immune cell extravasation in neuroinflammation.
Cell Behavior Video Classification Challenge
Visit project →