Marcello DiStasio, MD, PhD

I am a neuropathologist and researcher in neuroimmunology. My background is in electrophysiology and biomedical engineering of neural interface and neural information processing systems. My interests are in diseases of the central nervous system, including motor system diseases and cancer. I am working on advancing the techniques of computational pathology in order to better understand and diagnose diseases. My research involves the application of machine learning, image analysis, and statistics to histology and genomic data with the goal of better characterizing and classifying tumors.

I am developing software to analyze histologic images taken from the kinds of slides produced in the routine clinical evaluation of tissue. By using statistical and machine learning techniques, these algorithms look for patterns in cell placement and morphology that correspond to the tissue genetic profiles. I believe this simultaneous genotypic and phenotypic characterization of tumors will provide a deeper understanding of neurobiology, neuropathology, and caner immunology, and identify key elements of CNS microenvironments whose interactions advance our explanations and predictions of pathologic processes affecting the brain, retina, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system.