Roles
Research Associate Professor of Ophthalmology
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Biography
Dr. Cabrera DeBuc received her Ph.D. in applied physics (2002) from the University of Michigan. She is a research associate professor of ophthalmology at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
She is a biophysicist with specific training in ocular imaging technology and image analysis. Her research group has been supported by grants from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Alzheimer's Association, the National Institute on Aging, the Finker-Frenkel Family Foundation, and the National Eye Institute. Her research interests include medical applications of ultrafast laser technology and optical imaging, focusing on the human eye, including developing and using quantitative ophthalmic imaging analyses to enhance ocular health capabilities. Specifically, she has focused her research on the early detection of diabetic retinopathy using advanced optical imaging.
Besides ophthalmic-image processing research, she is also actively involved in leading ocular telehealth applications and clinical research related to novel ocular imaging biomarkers for the central nervous system's neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Cabrera DeBuc has presented nationally and internationally on various aspects of medical image processing and novel imaging biomarker development, emphasizing ophthalmology, data science, neuroscience, and vision science. She is also an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on medical imaging, an editorial board member of Scientific Reports (Nature), a Fellow of the SPIE, and a Fulbright scholar.
She is also devoted to Artificial Intelligence applications for disease diagnosis, running a multidisciplinary lab, and collaborating extensively with national and international investigators. Besides, she is an external advisory board member of the EU-funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network, "CLARIFY – CLoud ARtificial Intelligence For pathologY. "She is also the CEO and Founder of iScreen 2 Prevent, LLC, a University of Miami's spinoff company aiming to commercialize an AI-based screening platform to predict persons at risk of AD in primary and community health care settings. -
Honors & Awards
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Teaching Interests
Delia Debuc enjoys teaching, both in the classroom setting and in personal interactions with students, and sees it as an essential component of her career. She has experience with teaching at different levels from primary undergraduate to graduate courses, in fields such as general and applied physics, mathematics, biophysics, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering. Her format of teaching has been mainly focused on students developing the ability to do their learning and to engage them in critical thinking about the topic being taught and the world around them. -
Research Interests
As a faculty, Delia DeBuc works with scientists on diverse projects and collaborates with physician investigators on applications of her findings to clinical practice. Specifically, her research focuses on physical and mathematical analysis of ocular morphology and function as visualized by advanced optical imaging technologies. Also, she works with a diverse array of collaborators from computer science to mathematics and statistics to engineering, data science, bioinformatics, genetics, optometry, neurology, geriatrics, ophthalmology, and biology. She has found that this is where the strength of interdisciplinary research shows its full potential to stimulate the generation of new approaches to a problem that neither group nor field, has thought of before.
Delia DeBuc's research revolves around the development of biomarkers for neurodegenerative disorders affecting the eye and brain as well as the implementation of low-cost multimodal approaches based on mobile ophthalmic and neuroimaging technologies with ocular telehealth capabilities. Major undertakings are investigating distinctive brain and eye correlates of cognitive function in AD and the autonomic decline in PD, as well as to determine the role of the outer retina and choroid on the risk of developing diabetic retinopathy and further visual function loss. -
Publications
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