NICOLAS VILA BLANCO

Nicolás Vila Blanco is an Assistant Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, affiliated with the Department of Electronics and Computing under the Higher Technical School of Engineering. His research focuses on applying artificial intelligence techniques to medical and dental imaging, including age and sex prediction from dental radiographs, oral microbiome analysis, and automated medical diagnostics. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the same university, awarded in 2022 for his thesis on deep learning methodologies for dental age assessment.

Education: Doctorate in Computer Science (2022) from University of Santiago de Compostela, specializing in deep learning applications for medical imaging.

Research Interests: Nicolás' work bridges computer vision and healthcare, emphasizing explainable AI systems for forensic anthropology (e.g., age estimation from dental X-rays), clinical diagnostics (e.g., plaque analysis software), and microbiome characterization. He leads development of tools like DenTiUS Deep Plaque for plaque quantification and IDALib for image data augmentation.

His recent publications highlight innovations in fetal ultrasound analysis, heart segmentation algorithms, and primer evaluation for microbiome sequencing. Nicolás collaborates with the GSI Group (Intelligent Systems) and Artificial Vision research groups, advancing interdisciplinary projects in healthcare technology.

Advising and Grants: Currently supervising research in AI-driven medical solutions and actively pursuing grants for oral microbiota studies. His DenTiUS platform has been validated through randomized clinical trials.

Labs/Teams: Core member of the Intelligent Systems Group (GSI) and collaborator with the Artificial Vision group, driving advancements in automated medical image analysis systems.