Harvard Catalyst Profiles

I am co-director of the Applied Chest Imaging Laboratory, lead scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. 

The primary focus of my research has been in the area of signal processing and medical image analysis, especially the development of new algorithms and their application in clinical applications.
I develop quantitative imaging biomarkers to define novel primary or secondary endpoints in lung clinical investigations, specifically Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Pulmonary Vascular Disease (PVD) and Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD). In particular, his group is heavily involved in the development of novel imaging computational techniques that form the basis of the biomarker discovery pipeline to establish the clinical and genetics significant of chest diseases. His group has served as imaging core for the COPDGene study and the Framingham Heart Study Pulmonary Research Center among others. The current research lines span from the quantitative study of pulmonary vascular remodeling to the subtyping of parenchymal lung injury and the prediction of outcomes directly from imaging by means of artificial intelligence techniques.
Prior areas of interest included the development of techniques for the processing of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). He also designed and implementated image-guided approaches for laparoscopic (IRLUS) and endoscopic (IRGUS) interventions guided by ultrasound and its application to Natural Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES).  His image analysis interest includes the low-level operators based on tensor image analysis, image segmentation and registration and the application of deep learning approaches to medical imaging applications.

I am also an affiliated member of the Laboratory of Mathematics in imaging (LMI), and Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL), Clinical Image Guidance Laboratory (CIGL) and the Image Processing Laboratory (LPI).

Raúl received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Valladolid, Spain and conducted his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, and he is currently the Principal Investigator of three NIH NHLBI awards. He is a member of the IMPACT program at MIT and the Fleischner Society.

My thesis dissertation focused on the study of the local structure tensor based on quadrature filters as a descriptor of image orientation and its application to image segmentation in a Riemannian mean curvature flow framework. An application of this framework was for the segmentation of fetal ultrasound images for the assessment of fetal growth.