Andres Santos is a professor and the director of the Biomedical Image Technologies group (BIT-UPM) in Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). His research is oriented to finding technological solutions to actual clinical or biological relevant problems, especially with the aim of providing early diagnosis or therapy monitoring. His main contributions have been in the field of acquisition and analysis of biomedical images, always emphasizing the testing and validation of the proposed solutions with clinical teams. Apart from this translational research, he has also worked in a more basic approach oriented to increasing the knowledge and comprehension of biological processes.

Initially he worked on the development of digital architectures for signal and image processing. The most notable results were the proposal and validation of real-time text-to-speech converters and speech recognition systems, both with applications to help people with disabilities. Part of this work was carried out during stays at Digital Equipment Corp (Maynard, MA USA) and Speech Plus (Mountain View, CA USA) and let to technological transfers and scientific publications. During a postdoctoral stay at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park (CA USA), he was recognized as an International Research Fellow for his contributions in the design of specific processing architectures.

Later he focused his research on the acquisition, processing and quantitative analysis of biomedical images. One of the first contributions was the proposal and validation of techniques based on non-rigid registration for the analysis of dynamic echocardiographic images with the aim of early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. This was a collaboration with the hospital G. Marañón and resulted in several scientific publications and a transferred to technology to Siemens-Acuson. Other results were the design and validation of algorithms for dosimetry and planning in intraoperative radiotherapy (with hospital G. Marañón and the company GMV), techniques to determine the epileptic focus for image-guided surgery (in collaboration with Hospital Clínic de Barcelona and transferred to QuBioTech) and machine learning algorithms for glaucoma screening based on OCT images (collaboration with Parc de Salut Mar and Radboud University Medical Center). In neuroimaging, he has also developed tools to process diffusion MRI,  contrast-enhanced MRI and to analyze preclinical MRI/MRS (some in cooperation with Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya).

He has also opened a line of research for the analysis of advanced optical microscopy images to better understand different biological processes, especially embryonic development. In collaboration with the Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard (CNRS - France) images of early stages of zebrafish embryo were processed and software to produce gene expression atlases with cell resolution was developed and tested.

On the whole, these works have led to more than 200 scientific publications, national and international projects, technology transfers to several companies (e.g. Siemens-Acuson, DermaLumics, GMV, Sedecal, QuBioTech) and software packages made openly available to the scientific and medical communities (e.g. DCE@urLAB for the analysis of MRI, AtlasIT and MatchIT for creation of atlas of embryo development, RegSeg for the segmentation of diffusion MRI).

Throughout his career he has sought to transfer the results of research both to clinical practice (in collaboration with hospitals) and to his teaching activities. He has participated in several master and doctorate programs (including two that in 2011 achieved the mention of excellence from the Ministry of Education) and in the European Biomedical Engineering Postgraduate Program (coordinated by the Univ. Patras - Greece) where he participated during 17 editions. He has also co-directed a Master in "Biomedical Technology and Instrumentation" in collaboration with UNED (the Spanish open university).

He has supervised 19 PhD Thesis and 5 postdocs. After being in the group, some moved to relevant international research positions (e.g. MIT, Harvard Medical School, Stanford Univ., CERN), research departments in companies (e.g. Huawei, GMV) or founded their own companies (Medlumics, LeukoLabs, Spotlab).

Finally, he has created and directed the research group Biomedical Imaging Technology (http://www.die.upm.es/im/) recognized by the UPM, and member of CIBER-BBN, the Biomedical Research Networking Center in the areas of ​​Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (a network of 43 research groups selected on the basis of their scientific excellence by the Ministry of Science, with a mission of transferring results to industry and translating them to clinical practice).