MERLIN PROJECT RESEARCH GROUP REGISTRATION

Restoration requires cooperation of many entities from the socio-economic environment, and a particular emphasis should be placed on cooperation with industries that can benefit most from it, such as, e.g. Disastrous floods which have recently affected North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland Palatinate best illustrate the interaction between climate change and river engineering. Sebastian Birk from the UDE Aquatic Ecology Working Group, riverbeds and their flooded areas need more space and must be restored to their natural state. The leader of the Merlin project is the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). One of the partners is the Warsaw University of Life Sciences SGGW. They include universities, research institutes, nature conservation organisations, business, government, municipality stakeholders. The project entitled вЂњMERLIN вЂ“ Mainstreaming Ecological Restoration of freshwater-related ecosystems in a Landscape context: Innovation, upscaling and transformationвЂќ involves 44 partners from the European countries. Thanks to the EU funds, the projects implemented will be expanded, upscaled and developed into European-wide models. The EU funds in the amount of EUR 10 million will go to 17 areas вЂ“ from Finland to Israel, those where streams, rivers, as well as marshes and wetlands are currently already being restored to a near-natural state. The main objective of the MERLIN project is to find new and widely applicable solutions which will allow to restore the natural functions of degraded freshwater-related ecosystems, inter alia, to improve their water retention and carbon dioxide sequestration. Thanks to the EU funds, the issue of restorationВ of freshwater-related ecosystems in Europe is to be solved by 2025. As part of the Horizon 2020 programme, the European Union allocated EUR 21 million for this purpose. Link to the SLN Facility led by Dr.On 1 October 2021, the MERLIN project was launched, where SGGW is one of the partners.The project consortium unites the following partners: Imagine Eyes SA, the Medical University of Viena, ICFO, the Erasmus Medical CenterвЂ™s Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam, the INSERM at Quinze-Vingts National Eye Hospital, and the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. The research team at ICFO will also implement a retinal tracking functionality to eliminate, in real time, any possible image artifacts due to involuntary eye motion. This system will be able to provide aberration-corrected, magnified images at high resolution, allowing the observation of cones and rods. Pablo Loza, will be in charge of designing and implementing the AO-SLO system.

MERLIN PROJECT RESEARCH GROUP REGISTRATION

To achieve these goals, the project will combine several cutting-edge technologies, including scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO), optical coherence tomography (OCT), multimodal image registration and segmentation, as well as adaptive optics (AO), which have been previously developed by the MERLIN partners.ДЄs a member of the consortium, ICFOвЂ™s research group led by SLN Head Dr. Fast non-contact examinations with the MERLIN device will offer a level of detail that is currently unavailable to doctors. The objective is to provide three-dimensional views and analyses of changes in single cells and in the smallest blood vessels inside patientsвЂ™ eyes. The MERLIN project will address these critical needs with a new retinal imaging device. With the aim of developing breakthrough medical instrumentation for imaging the back of the eye, MERLINвЂ™s applications will encompass a wide range of pathologies that impact the eyeвЂ™s retina, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), as well as chronic vascular conditions, including diabetes. Recently, a consortium of European industrial, scientific and medical partners, which include ICFO, has gathered in Paris to attend the kick off meeting of the MERLIN project. ICFO participates in the MERLIN project, aimed to deliver breakthrough medical technology to image the back of the eye.

Merlin project research group