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About

João Paulo Cunha is Full Professor of Bioengineering & Electrical & Computers Engineering (ECE) at the Department of ECE of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), Portugal; Senior Researcher at the INESC-TEC: Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering where he created and coordinates the BRAIN – Biomedical Research And INnovation - research group and co-founded the Center for Biomedical Engineering Research (C-BER) that aggregates ~40 researchers. Prof. Cunha is also a mentor/co-founder and/or contributor to several MedTech/DeepTech startups (eight until now) by advising and/or licensing intellectual property of innovative biomedical technology developed for several years in his lab, such as Biodevices SA, Sword Health (http://www.swordhealth.com), iLof-Intelligent Lab-on-Fiber (https://ilof.tech), SeedSight (http://seedsight.io) and inSignals Neurotech (http://www.insignals-neurotech.com). He is visiting professor at the Neurology Dep., Faculty of Medicine of the University of Munich, Germany since 2002 and at the Carnegie Mellon University – Silicon Valley Campus, USA, between 2016 and 2021. He serves as Scientific Director of the Carnegie-Mellon | Portugal program since 2014.

He earned a degree in Electronics and Telecommunications engineering (1989), a Ph.D. (1996) and an Habilitation (“Agregação”) degree (2009) in Electrical Engineering all at the University of Aveiro, Portugal.

Dr. Cunha is Senior Member of the IEEE – Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers - (2004), member of the Editorial Board of NATURE/Scientific Reports (5th most cited journal in 2022) and Associate Editor of FRONTIERS/Signal Processing journal. He is also habitual reviewer of several IEEE journals and other relevant scientific journals such as PLoS ONE or Movement Disorders. He is an internationally renowned expert in advanced biosignal processing, human motion analysis and neuroimaging. He has supervised and co-supervised more than 15 PhD & Post-doc students in his areas of R&D. He received several awards, being the most relevant the European Epilepsy Academy (EUREPA) “Best Contribution for Clinical Epileptology” Award in 2002. Prof. Cunha is co-author of +200 scientific publications and 43 patents from 10 patent families, holding an h-index of 37 (Google Scholar), with +6,000 citations.

Interest
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Details

Details

  • Name

    João Paulo Cunha
  • Role

    Centre Coordinator
  • Since

    01st January 2013
  • Nationality

    Portugal
  • Contacts

    +351222094106
    joao.p.cunha@inesctec.pt
032
Publications

2026

A Novel Method for Real-Time Human Core Temperature Estimation Based on Extended Kalman Filter

Authors
Aslani R.; Dias D.; Coca A.; Cunha J.P.S.;

Publication
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics

Abstract
The gold standard real-time core temperature (CT) monitoring methods are invasive and cost-inefficient. The application of the Kalman filter for an indirect estimation of CT has been explored in the literature for more than 10 years. This paper presents a comparative study between different state-of-the-art Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) approaches. Moreover, we proposed the addition of an extra layer to the pipeline that applies a pre-emptive mapping concept based on the physiological response of the heart rate (HR) signal, before using it as input to the EKF. The algorithm was trained and tested using two datasets (18 subjects). The best-performing approach with the novel pre-emptive mapping achieved an average Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.34 ?C, while without pre-emptive mapping, it resulted in an RMSE of 0.41 ?C, leading to a performance improvement of 17%. Given these favorable outcomes, it is compelling to assess the efficacy of this method on a larger dataset in the future.

2026

Video-based epileptic seizure classification: A novel multi-stage approach integrating vision and motion transformer deep learning models

Authors
Aslani, R; Karácsony, T; Fearns, N; Caldeiras, C; Vollmar, C; Rego, R; Rémi, J; Noachtar, S; Cunha, JPS;

Publication
BIOMEDICAL SIGNAL PROCESSING AND CONTROL

Abstract
Automated seizure quantification and classification are needed for semiology-based epileptic seizure diagnosis support. To the best of our knowledge, the 5-class (Hypermotor, Automotor, Complex Motor, Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures, and Generalized Tonic-Clonic Seizures) seizure video dataset (198 seizures from 74 patients) studied in this paper is the largest 5-class dataset ever curated, composed of monocular RGB videos from two university hospital epilepsy monitoring units. 2D skeletons were estimated using ViTPose, a vision transformer deep learning (DL) architecture, and lifted to 3D space using MotionBERT, a multimodal motion transformer architecture. The movements were quantified based on the estimated 3D skeleton sequences. Two approaches were evaluated for seizure classification: (1) classical machine learning methods (Random Forest (RF) and XGBoost) applied to quantified movement parameters, and (2) 2D skeleton-based DL using MotionBERT action, an action recognition DL model, to which we perform transfer-learning. The best model achieved a promising, above literature, 5-fold cross-validated macro average F1-score of 0.84 +/- 0.09 (RF) for 5-class classification. The binary case (Automotor vs Hypermotor) resulted in 0.80 +/- 0.18 (MotionBERT action), and adding a 3rd class (Complex motor) lowered to 0.65 +/- 0.14 (RF). This novel multi-stage classification ensures that the included movement features are traceable, allowing interpretable AI exploration of this novel approach supporting future clinical diagnosis.

2025

WeSync(BLE): A Reference Synchronization Architecture of Multiple Wearable BLE-Based Biomedical Devices

Authors
Vieira F.M.P.; Woods J.; Dias D.; Silva Cunha J.P.;

Publication
Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Annual International Conference

Abstract
Recent advances in embedded systems, wireless communication, and IoT technologies have driven the development of Wearable Health Devices (WHDs), enabling continuous monitoring of biosignals with low power consumption and high data transmission rates. Among various wireless communication protocols, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) stands out due to its energy efficiency and high transmission rate, making it the preferred choice for developing compact and high-performance wearables. However, achieving precise time synchronization across multiple BLE-enabled devices remains a challenge, particularly in distributed systems where sensor nodes operate independently. In this work, we present the WeSync(BLE) our reference synchronization architecture developed for multiple wearable BLE-based biomedical devices intended to streamline the use of numerous wearable devices and synchronize the data acquired across them. A proof-of-concept of this reference synchronization architecture was made using proprietary BLE wearables (used for acquiring motion data). This demonstrated effective synchronization with minimal implementation and latency, achieving an absolute mean and standard deviation of 9.2 ± 6.7 milliseconds, at 1 hour of testing. This work paves the way for a more robust real-time wearable systems synchronization, advancing the analysis and study of biosignals.

2025

Enhanced dynamic cerebral autoregulation and impaired vasoreactivity may contribute to white matter damage in hypertension: A correlational tractography and transcranial Doppler study

Authors
Fortunato, M; Monteiro, A; Oliveira, TG; Castro, P; Polónia, J; Azevedo, E; Cunha, JP; Morais, R;

Publication
NEUROSCIENCE

Abstract
Hypertension (HT) is the leading risk factor for cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD). White matter lesions (WML) linked to CSVD are visible on conventional neuroimaging, likely reflecting late irreversible stages of the CSVD pathological cascade. Despite the prevalence of this disease, the mechanistic link between CSVD, hypertension and WML remains poorly understood. In this prospective, cross-sectional study, 44 hypertensive patients asymptomatic of CSVD underwent diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) and transcranial Doppler (TCD) monitoring of the right middle and left posterior cerebral arteries (MCA and PCA, respectively) to assess dynamic cerebral autoregulation (dCA) and vasomotor reactivity to CO2 (VRCO2). Diffusion measures from two dMRI models quantified the WM structural integrity: fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, axial diffusivity, and radial diffusivity from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and quantitative anisotropy (QA) and isotropy from q-space diffeomorphic reconstruction (QSDR). We examined the association of dMRI measures with dCA and VRCO2 through correlational tractography. We observed that impaired VRCO2 was associated with decreased WM structural integrity, indicated by the associations of reduced QA and increased MD and RD with lower VRCO2. Regarding dCA, we found a negative association between QA and the phase parameter, indicating an increased dCA in association with reduced WM structural integrity. Our results suggest that HT-induced remodeling of the cerebrovasculature, with enhanced dCA and impaired VRCO2, may contribute to impaired brain function and lead to CSVD, and highlight the potential of integrating TCD studies and dMRI, including QSDR-derived metrics, to investigate the natural progression of CSVD from its early, asymptomatic stages.

2025

Clinical application and new visualization techniques of 3D-quantitative motion analysis in epileptic seizures characterized by ictal automatic movements

Authors
Loesch-Biffar, AM; Karácsony, T; Sattlegger, L; Vollmar, C; Rémi, J; Cunha, JPS; Noachtar, S;

Publication
EPILEPSY & BEHAVIOR

Abstract
Purpose: Our aim was to test the capability of the NeuroKinect 3D-method, as a movement visualization technique and quantitative analysis to differentiate ictal movements such as hyperkinetic and focal seizures with manual automatisms. The dataset is extracted from the NeuroKinect dataset, which is a RGB-D-IR dataset of epileptic seizures. The dataset is recorded with Kinect v2 and consists of RGB, Infrared (IR) and depth streams. Quantitative 3D-movement analysis of 20 motor seizures was performed. Velocity, acceleration, jerk, covered distance, displacement and movement extent of Regions of Interests (= ROI: head, right hand, left hand and trunk) were captured. Results: Among the analyzed seizures were 10 hyperkinetic (n = 7: 4 male, 3 female; mean age 39.6 years (SD f 9.7)) and 10 focal seizures with manual automatisms (n = 10: 2 male, 8 female; mean age 39.2 years (SD f 17.6)). Hyperkinetic seizures exhibited higher mean velocity in all ROIs (e.g. head = 0.62 f 0.28 (m/s) vs. 0.12 f 0.07 (m/s)) as well as higher mean acceleration and mean jerk in most ROIs; these differences were statistically significant. Mean movement extent, covered distance, and displacement for all ROIs were larger for hyperkinetic seizures, however not significantly. The duration of ictal movements (80 s f 38 s versus 26 s f 14 s; p = 0.001) was significantly longer in focal seizures with manual automatisms. Conclusions: This new visualization technique allows to reconstruct tracked movement via 3D viewer and supports a 3D movement quantification which is capable to differentiate seizures characterized by movements, which may help to localize the epileptogenic zone.