JOÃO BERNARDES is the creator of SisPorto Project, in 1987 together with , Carlos Moura, Joaquim Marques-de-Sá and Luís Pereira Leite.
He is graduated and earned his doctoral and aggregation degrees in Medicine at FMUP, where he is full professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics, director of the Department of Gynecology-Obstetrics and Pediatrics and member of the Scientific Council. He was founder and director of the Biomedical Simulation Centre and former director of the PhD Program in Medicine of FMUP.
He also works as Senior Doctor at the University Hospital Centre of S. João, in Porto, where he was director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
He is president of the Portuguese Board of Gynecologist and Obstetricians and vice-president of the Disciplinary Board of the North Council of the Portuguese Order of Doctors.
He was vice-president of the Portuguese Society of Medical Education and secretary of the Portuguese Society of Biomedical Engineering. He is principal Investigator in the Research Unit CINTESIS and he was former leader of projects of the National Board for Scientific and Technical Research, which gave way to the market model of the system for cardiotocograms’ analysis SisPorto.
He is member of the Editorial Council of several scientific journals, having authored and co-authored about 200 scientific articles in indexed journals.
DIOGO AYRES-DE-CAMPOS, MD, PhD is a Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Medical School, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is also Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology the Santa Maria University Hospital, Lisbon.
His main scientific areas of interest are intrapartum fetal monitoring and obstetric simulation. He is a co-inventor of the “Omniview-SisPorto®” program for computer analysis of fetal monitoring signals (Speculum, Lisbon, Portugal, 2006), the clinical record database Obscare (Virtualcare, Porto, Portugal, 2002), and was the medical consultant for the development of the “Lucina®” obstetric simulator (CAE Healthcare, Montreal, Canada, 2014).
With an h-index of 34, he has published 147 papers in international Medline-indexed journals, edited 2 international books, and has given 248 invited lectures at international scientific meetings. He was Editor-in-chief of the “Acta Obstetrica e Ginecologica Portuguesa” 2006-2010, and Associate Editor of “ISRN Obstetrics and Gynecology” 2012-2014.
He is the President of the “European Association of Perinatal Medicine – EAPM”, Executive Committe Member of the “European Board and College of Obstetrics and Gynecology – EBCOG”, and co-ordinator of the EBCOG Part 2 Exam. Between 2010 and 2018 he integrated the “Safe Motherhood and Newborn Health committee” at the “International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology – FIGO”, where he co-ordinated the 2015 revision of the “FIGO guidelines on intrapartum fetal monitoring”. He participated in the World Health Organisation consensus panels for “Recommendations on antenatal care” and “Intrapartum care and reduction of unnecessary caesarean section”.
He is the President of the “Federation of Portuguese Societies of Obstetrics and Gynecology – FSPOG”, a Board member of the Subespeciality in Maternal-Fetal Medicine of the Portuguese General Medical Council, and presided over the “National Commission for Reduction of Cesarean Section rates”, nominated by the Portuguese Ministery of Health.
CRISTINA COSTA SANTOS is Professor at Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto and researcher at the Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS). She received a Bsc degree in Applied Mathematics from University of Porto and a Master degree in Statistics and Information Management from New University of Lisbon. She earned her doctoral and aggregation degrees in Clinical and Health Services Research at Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto.
In 1996, Cristina participated was junior research fellow in SisPorto – Multicenter validation of the cardiotocogram automated analysis system, funded by the National Board of Scientific and Technological Research (JNICT), currently named Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Since then, she has been participated in the research activities of the SisPorto project.
Her research interests include analysis of cardiotocograpfic signals; biostatistics, in particular statistical methods for assessing agreement in medicine and complexity science, in particular applications of complexity science to medicine. She supervised several PhD and Master thesis. She has been involved in several national, and international research projects. With an H-index of 22, she published one hundred articles of which more than 80 are full papers published in journals indexed in ISI web of knowledge.
PAULO SOUSA
HERNÂNI GONÇALVES joined the activities of the SisPorto research group in 2002, under the scope of the final internship of his BSc degree in Technology Applied Mathematics, followed by his participation in the project “Tachographic, spectral and fractal analysis of heart rate in pre and postnatal life. Applications in diagnostic systems and medical education” (CARDIOCRONOS, funded by FCT).
Still in the area of applied mathematics, between 2005 and 2010, he developed work in the field of geomatics and environmental applications, with a particular focus on image processing and remote sensing, during which he concluded his PhD in Geomatics with the thesis entitled “Automatic registration of satellite images”.
Between 2011 and 2017, with a Post-doctoral fellowship from FCT, he developed work in “Linear and non-linear analysis of fetal heart rate. Clinical evaluation and technological development in health services”, at the Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS).
He is currently Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto and the principal investigator of the Signal Processing Applications (SPA) research group from CINTESIS (part of the Associate Laboratory “Health Research Network” – RISE). His research interests include data analysis, biomedical signal analysis and image processing.
TERESA HENRIQUES (T.H.) is a junior researcher at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Portugal (FMUP) as awarded with Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus (CEECIND/02774/2017). TH joined the SisPorto group in 2010 while working in her master thesis. Her research work has been understanding complexity loss in life-threatening conditions and the translation of complexity science to biomedical risk stratification and decision-making.
T.H. collaborated with an H2020 project – the DigiNewB and the study of blood pressure fluctuations in patients undergoing cardiac surgery (NIGMS RO-1; Dynamic Markers of Intraoperative Instability; B. Subramaniam, PI) in conjunction with A. L. Goldberger and M. D. Costa were of great significance for her professional development.
Her academic background is in mathematics applied to clinical research with a Ph.D. in 2015 from FMUP, supported by the Portuguese National Science Foundation. T.H.’s current work developed with the BioData group – Biostatistics & Intelligent Data Analysis – at CINTESIS (mentors Cristina Costa-Santos, Ph.D., and Luís F. Antunes, Ph.D.) has allowed her to apply and improve the acquired knowledge to real-world data.
INÊS NUNES, MD, PhD, is a Specialist in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Intrapartum Care, at the Centro Materno-Infantil do Norte (CMIN) – Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto (CHUPorto), Portugal. She is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics at ICBAS – School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and a researcher in the area of intrapartum fetal monitoring and obstetric simulation at CINTESIS – Center for Research in Health Technologies and Services, at the University of Porto, Portugal.
With an H-index of 7, she has published 20 papers in international Medline-indexed journals, has collaborated in national and international books, and has given more than 70 lectures at national and international scientific meetings.
She is currently a member of the Special Interest Group on Intrapartum Care, at the European Association of Perinatal Medicine (EAPM) and is an Associate Member of the Committee on Childbirth and PPH at the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO).
LUÍSA CASTRO is a researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP), in Portugal since 2020, and a post-doc fellow in the same institution since October 2016. She joined SisPorto in February of 2019, soon after she earned a post-doc position under the international project DigiNewB, an EU-funded project aiming to improve the care of newborns through multi-signal monitoring, focusing on the early detection of sepsis and cardio-respiratory maturation. Currently, her main interests are the extraction of relevant information by applying spectral and non-linear analysis on fetuses and maternal biophysical signals, in order to improve the early detection of newborn pathologies.
Luísa’s background is in mathematics, with a master’s degree in mathematical engineering and a PhD in applied mathematics, 2013, where she developed computational biophysical models for spatial information encoding in neuronal populations, a multidisciplinary project that allowed her to improve her competencies in the statistical and computational areas.
CATARINA REIS de CARVALHO, MD, is currently an Obstetrics and Gynecology consultant in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Medical School – Santa Maria University Hospital, Lisbon, Portugal. She is a PhD student in the area of intrapartum fetal monitoring, specifically studying the development of non-invasive external monitoring with fetal ECG. She has published 10 papers in international Medline-indexed journals, collaborated in national and international books and in several national and international scientific meetings. She works as a teaching assistent in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon.