Manuel has been active since 1984 in computer vision, and since 2002 in medical image analysis. He has published more than 250 refereed papers and 2 textbooks (one of which an international standard with 2,793 citations, Google Scholar 25 Oct 2016). He is co-director of VAMPIRE (Vessel Assessment and Measurement Platform for Images of the Retina), an international research initiative led by the Universities of Dundee and Edinburgh (co-director Dr T MacGillivray). VAMPIRE develops software tools for efficient data and image analysis, with a focus on multi-modal retinal images. VAMPIRE has been used in UK and international biomarker studies on cardiovascular risk, stroke, dementia, diabetes and complications, cognitive performance, neurodegenerative diseases, and genetics. Dr Tom MacGillivray is an expert in the field of image processing and analysis for clinical research. His team staffs the Image Analysis Core laboratory of the Edinburgh Imaging group joint with the Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility, at the University of Edinburgh where he is a Senior Research Fellow. The laboratory provides specialist support to investigators accessing data from a variety of imaging modalities including MR, CT, PET, ultrasound and retinal imaging. Dr MacGillivray has extensive experience with retinal image processing and analysis with more than 15 years experience facilitating clinical research that features retinal imaging. This includes studies on stroke, cardiovascular disease, MS, diabetes, kidney disease, dementia and age-related cognitive change. In close collaboration with the University of Dundee (Prof E. Trucco, School of Computing), he co-ordinates an interdisciplinary initiative called VAMPIRE (Vascular Assessment and Measurement Platform for Images of the REtina, vampire.computing.dundee.ac.uk) whose aim is efficient, semi-automatic analysis of retinal images and the pursuit of biomarker identification. Yanwu Xu (Frank) is the Chief Architect/Scientist of AI Innovation Business Department, Baidu Online Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology & Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He received the B.Eng. and PhD degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He worked as a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, from 2009 to 2011, a Research Scientist at Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, from 2011 to 2017, and the head of Biomedical Research Department at Central Research Institute, CVTE, from 2017 to 2018. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences, including T-MI, T-SMCB, JAMIA, MICCAI, etc. He has applied for more than 30 China patents (5 granted) and 11 PCT international patents (5 granted), including two licensed to a NMC and a Singapore startup.
