Alejandro Alcaine, Ph.D.

About me

My research path began by developing innovative signal processing tools to guide the treatment of arrhythmia and to understand the mechanisms of arrhythmia generation. All my research was focused on clinical applications founded in the knowledge of the underlying pathophysiology.

After earning my international Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering with the highest honors in late 2016, I became postdoctoral researcher at the BCN MedTech Unit of Universitat Pompeu Fabra and also research engineer at the Arrhythmia Section of Hospital Clinic (2017-2019). During this stage, my research shifted towards multimodal data analysis of cardiovascular data using machine learning techniques to combine signal, image, and clinical data. Later (2019-2020), I moved to the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red en Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina (CIBER-BBN) as postdoctoral researcher when I continued my research in arrhythmia assessment, specifically in atrial fibrillation. Finally, I spent 5 years (2020-2025) at Universidad San Jorge as Associate Professor (Profesor Titular de Universidad) teaching at the B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering and at the B.Sc. in Bioinformatics.

Nowadays, I'm Assistant Professor (Profesor Ayudante Doctor LOSU) at the Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering of University of Zaragoza. I am one of the founders of the Computing for Medical and Biological Applications (CoMBA) research group where I lead the research line regarding image processing and artificial intelligence towards personalized medicine, focussing on investigating image processing and machine learning techniques to assess kidney congestion in hospitalized patients with acute heart failure condition through the DEVCONHEART project.

Some Keywords: Acute Heart Failure, Atrial Fibrillation, Cardiac Arrhythmias, Cardiorenal Syndrome, Catheter Ablation, Computational Cardiology, Electroanatomical Mapping, Electrograms, Digital Signal Processing, Image Processing, Kidney congestion, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Ventricular Tachycardia.

Examples of activation maps with zoom view of the early activation site (white square): a) using the manual annotations obtained during the ablation procedure, b) using the averaged annotations created after the ablation procedure by two different experts, and c) automatic activation map. LATs are shown in 10 ms isochronal areas colour-coded from red (earlier) to pink (later). White small spheres indicate location of mapping points whereas white big spheres indicate anatomical reference points. Pointed red spheres indicate location of RF delivery. Orange spheres indicate His/Purkinje points, cyan spheres indicate double EGMs, blue spheres indicate end of sheath, black spheres indicate a point of interest, green spheres indicate manually introduced annotations and grey spheres indicate discarded points. Ap: apex, AP: anterior-posterior OT: outflow tract, PA: posterior-anterior, TA: tricuspid annulus.