MSc in Electronic Engineering and PhD in Medical Sciences (1997, KU Leuven, Belgium). Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Imaging and Cardiac Dynamics at the Faculty of Medicine in Leuven (1998-2004). He supervised clinical research at St. George's Hospital in London (2005-2006). In 2007, he was resident Visiting Professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Since Sept. 2008, he is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

B. Bijnens is recognised as international expert in pathophysiological concepts and technical implementation in assessing CV diseases, with a reputation of being able to explain basic pathophysiology principles and to put technical developments in context. This resulted in many invitations to lecture at major International Conferences and in leading Research Centres. He is requested by centres all over the world for advice on research projects and papers.

Research interests

Translational Cardiovascular Pathophysiology, focussing on assessing cardiac function and understanding and recognising the changes induced by disease and how treatment strategies can be used to modulate this remodelling. This is approached by integrating information handling and processing techniques, combined with basic knowledge on cardiovascular pathophysiology in order to advance clinical sciences. This implies defining the research approach from the basic understanding of the disease towards the clinical study; selecting/designing the appropriate investigational tools to assess the relevant clinical parameters; quantifying the diagnostic information (from clinical information to imaging data) to extract the most pertinent information and interpreting the results and relate them to the pathophysiological knowledge.

Recent projects include the combination of computational modelling approaches with machine learning in order to find interpretable and easy to implement/deploy techniques for the identification of patients at risk for adverse events, especially mothers and fetuses in lower-income countries.