I will soon leave the University of Sussex to join City University London where I will lead the Image Analysis of the Biomedical Engineering Research Group. I will have several opportunities for research students there, so contact me if you are interested in Biomedical Image Analysis.



I will host my personal webpage within phagosight.org. Please visit that page for up to date information as this page will disappear in the future



I am a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Sussex in the School of Engineering and Design

My area of research is Image Analysis of Biomedical Images. This research covers three particular areas: the acquisition (I have worked with  light and fluorescent microscopes as well as access to confocal and multiphoton microscopes) of biomedical images, the analysis through algorithms, mathematical models and statistical methodologies, which provide quantitative measurements, and the interpretation of the data (2D images, 3D volumes, 2D+t videos, 3D+t volumetric time lapse data sets). This final stage is crucial, what conclusions can we draw from the images? Can we reveal something of the underlying biological processes of cells or tumours? What are the effects of drugs or treatments? By using image analysis we are able to extract a wealth of information that is present in the images we capture, and that it is not possible to obtain by simple qualitative analysis.


My overall objective is to shed some light into the causes and processes of human illnesses especially cancer, and the infection or inflammation processes related to this diseas. By analysing the images and videos from many experiments I hope to and contribute in finding ways to cure and prevent them.

I have analysed different biological processes - cell migration, vascular permeability, red cell velocity, inflammation - and this research has lead to more than 25 journal papers.

I have developed Image Analysis algorithms and software developed the following experiments:

  • Tracking of fluorescently labelled Red Blood Cells,
  • Quantification of vascular permeability to FITC-Dextran in tumours,
  • Measurement of cell migration in vitro.
  • Geometrical analysis of vessels from immunohistochemistry images stained for CD-31,
  • Topological analysis of tumour vasculature in light microscopy images,
  • Measurement of fluorescence intensity for vessel and perfusion quantification.

Academic Background

My undergraduate degree is from the  National University in Mexico (UNAM, Facultad de Ingeniería) in 1993 with the degree of Ingeniero Mecánico Electricista, (BS Mechanical and Electrical Engineering). I then obtained an M.Sc. (MSc in Communications and Signal Processing) and D.I.C. from Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine in 1994. From 1995 until 2000 I worked in Mexico for several years as a Lecturer at ITESM and ITAM  teaching Communications and Electromagnetics related subjects.  From 2001 until 2004 I returned to the United Kingdom to obtain a Ph.D. in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Abhir Bhalerao in the area of Medical Image Analysis with a thesis on Multiresolution Volumetric Texture Segmentation. At the same time, I worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Computer Science,  University of Warwick. From 2005 to 2011 I worked as a Research Associate and then Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield in the Tumour Microcirculation Group. In May 2011 I joined the University of Sussex as a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering.



Professional and Outreach Activities

Conference Chair MIUA: Medical Image Understanding and Analysis, University of Sussex, July 2014
Conference Co-chair ANGIONET Angiogenesis Network, Sheffield University, January 2007 (with Markus Owen, University of Nottingham).
Journal Reviewer IEEE Transactions on: Medical Imaging, Image Processing, Neural Networks, Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,
Pattern Recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters,
Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine.
Conference Area Chair British Machine Vision Conference, Warwick University, September 2007.
Conference Technical Program Committee IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications 2006, 2007, 2008.
International Conference on Imaging Theory and Applications, IMAGAPP 2009, 2010.
ACCV 2009, 2010 Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV).
Computational Modeling of Objects Represented in Images: Fundamentals, Methods and Applications, CompIMAGE'2010 Symposium.
Science Ambassador National Science and Engineering Week 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011.