For his master’s thesis he started to work with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) where he developed an algorithm to detect the quality of retina images acquired by fundus cameras (an invention disclosure was obtained). During his PhD at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Université de Bourgogne he worked on many different retina analysis algorithms to automatically screen diabetic patients for retinopathy and macular edema. The result of his work is currently used in medical clinics and various prizes were awarded to his research team; the R&D Award by R&D Magazine, ORNL Award Excellence in Technology Transfer, ORNLSignificant Event Team Award and FLC South-east Regional Award Excellence in Technology Transfer. In 2011, he started a postdoctoral fellowship with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy) where he worked on automated analysis of the brain connections in diffusion MRI and on vision-based systems to track and classify small animal behaviors.

On his ambitions as an M+Visión Fellow, Luca says “what I really like to do is to understand how our mind works, and to sort of put that into context and teach a computer how that works. Its really rewarding to have that applicable to medicine, because these applications were often for manufacturing.”

Luca notes that working directly with clinicians has been a crucial difference between M+Visión and his previous experience.

“My experience as a PhD and a postdoc was to work with a barrier between me and the clinicians. Clinicians- and people in general, especially if they are really good at something- have trouble explaining something in simple words. And the only way to  understand that is to go and look and ask questions about what they need.”