11.09.2025 | Grants & Awards | Biomechanics

Salvatore Conticello Wins Award for Best Student Paper at BMT Meeting 2025

At this year's meeting of the Swiss, Austrian and German Societies for Biomedical Engineering, Salvatore Conticello of the CBE group was able to present his project "Ultrashort Time Echo MRI Sequence to Quantify Vertebral Bone Morphology in Young Adults" and won the Best Student Paper award.

From September 09 – 11, 2025, the Swiss (SSBE), Austrian (ÖGBMT) and German (VDE DGBMT) Societies for Biomedical Engineering came together for a three-day conference in Muttenz/Basel. Throughout the conference, projects and posters on topics such as Biomedical Imaging, Digital Health & Technology, Robotics & Rehabilitation and many more were presented.

Among the presenters was ARTORG’s very own Salvatore Conticello, PhD researcher in the Computational Bioengineering group. On September 09, he presented his paper at the Biomechanics session of the conference.

The aim of the paper was to investigate the reliability and repeatability of a novel MRI sequence, Ultrashort Time Echo (UTE). In his work, Salvatore focuses on simulating vertebral bone growth in adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis. To achieve this, he creates patient-specific computational models representing the spines of the patients. To measure vertebral growth, he and his project partners are recruiting young adolescents with scoliosis and will follow them for two years.

Salvatore with his Best Student Paper Award at the BMT Meeting 2025. ©Salvatore Conticello

Accurate visualization of the bone is essential for quantifying growth. Usually, CT scans are considered the gold standard for visualizing bone, but since they are dealing with children, Salvatore and his co-authors tried to find a suitable radiation-free alternative. Having come across this novel MRI sequence, they decided to further investigate it and performed two sets of scans on 10 healthy volunteers to assess the error between scans and determine whether the UTE sequence: 1) can be used to measure the vertebral growth longitudinally, and 2) captures bone morphology features that are normally less visible or invisible on standard MRI sequences.

Among the eight finalists of this year’s Student Competition, Salvatore was one of the three prize winners. Congratulations on this amazing achievement!

Salvatore and the other seven finalists at the award ceremony. ©De Gruyter Brill Medicine/Katharina J. Appelt