Mariana Falcão

Mariana Falcão is a Portuguese PhD student at the CHUV-UNIL Translational Magnetic Resonance Research Center since March 2019.

During her BSc and MSc, Mariana studied Biomedical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon, Portugal. During the academic year of 2016/2017, she attended the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne as an exchange student. Later, she decided to return to Switzerland for her Master thesis, at the Medical Image Processing Lab, in Campus Biotech, Geneva, under the supervision of Prof. Dimitri Van De Ville and Elvira Pirondini. In her Master project she looked for biomarkers in patients with Parkinson’s Disease using diffusion weighted imaging in order to find differences in the brain structure that could be used to improve the understanding of this condition, both on the diagnosis and the treatment side. Additionally, she studied the influence of deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices in Parkinsonian patients using electroencephalography signals, and looked for biomarkers which could represent the improvement of the motor symptomatology of patients with this treatment, and that could perhaps help to tune the stimulation parameters of DBS in the future to optimize the outcome for the patients.

At the CHUV-UNIL Translational Magnetic Resonance Research Center, Mariana works on cardiac MR imaging, with a focus on respiratory and cardiac resolved multi-dimensional flow imaging (5D flow). The goal of her work is to integrate anatomical information of the thoracic region together with heart motion, breathing motion and blood flow information. Gathering all these components in one single acquisition and reconstruction would enable a simplified but detailed description of the cardiovascular system and could facilitate the diagnostic and monitoring of several heart diseases, such as mitral valve abnormalities and congenital heart disease.

In her free time, Mariana enjoys cooking, photography, hiking, reading and spending time with her family and friends.