
Upon completing his studies he met Professor Marcello Massimini from the University of Milan, who was setting up a transcranial magnetic stimulation and EEG laboratory; Massimini needed someone to program the signal processing and analysis tools. “Since I learned how to program at the university, I accepted the proposal,” he says. For about a year he conducted programs for the laboratory, and in 2007 he was hired as a researcher. “I realized the great potential of the technique and I decided to study physiology, and in early 2009 I submitted a scientific proposal for a doctorate in the area.”

Adenauer Casali: Distinct universesAdenauer Casali
In his PhD, which he defended in January 2012 at the University of Milan School of Medicine, Casali worked with Massimini and developed a new method for measuring the level of consciousness in people with brain damage. “This is an objective measurement used as a scale for the level of consciousness,” he says.
Named PCI (perturbational complexity index), the method made the cover of the August 14 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine. “The publication caught the eye of European and American groups for using the technique in clinical research, not only to measure the level of consciousness, but also to assist in the diagnosis and prognosis of other conditions in which areas of the brain may be altered, such as schizophrenia and depression,” he notes. When he returned to Brazil in 2012 he continued to work with foreign groups, such as Milan, the University of Liège in Belgium and the University of Wisconsin in the United States because the technique is not yet used in clinical research in Brazil. Since July this year, after being invited by Professor Maria Claudia Irigoyen to work on cardiac signal processing, he has been doing graduate work at the Heart Institute (InCor).
For Casali, it was the flexibility that he acquired through his training in the exact sciences that enabled him to transit through such different universes. “I learned how to deal with data in an organized manner, which is common to many areas of knowledge.”
Republish