Daan Christiaens
Assistant Professor at KU Leuven
Brussels Metropolitan Area Belgium
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaan Christiaens is an Assistant Professor and neuroimage analysis researcher with 12 years of experience specializing in diffusion-weighted MRI and microstructure imaging of early brain development. He combines deep academic training (PhD in Electrical Engineering) with hands-on software engineering, contributing core back-end features to the widely used MRtrix3 toolkit—most notably implementing and stabilizing global tractography. His work spans academic roles at KU Leuven and King's College London, developing neonatal and fetal diffusion MRI post-processing pipelines and novel diffusion methods. Known for tackling low-level implementation challenges (memory alignment, complex data handling) as well as high-level modeling, he bridges rigorous method development with production-grade imaging software. Based in Brussels, he brings a rare mix of theoretical neuroimaging expertise and practical open-source engineering experience.
12 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Electrical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Electrical Engineering at University of LeuvenMaster of Engineering, Biomedical information technology, magna cum laude, Master of Engineering, Biomedical information technology, magna cum laude at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Dutch, English, French, German
Github Skills (8)
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
diffusion-mri10
tractography10
image-processing10
algorithms9
eigen8
multithreading8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
MRtrix3/mrtrix3
Apr 2014 - Jan 2023
MRtrix3 provides a set of tools to perform various advanced diffusion MRI analyses, including constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD), probabilistic tractography, track-density imaging, and apparent fibre density
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 354 commits, 73 PRs in 8 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Daan implemented and refined global tractography features for MRtrix3. The commits involved initialising global tractography in a new MRtrix version, fixing various bugs, handling complex data, and adding options such as for Hanning window width and particle potential. The focus of the commits was improving the core functionality and stability of the tractography module, along with the implementation of new user-facing options. The work included integrating code enhancements from other branches and addressing issues related to memory alignment and data handling.
analysesdeconvolutionmrifibreimaging
dchristiaens/shard-recon
Mar 2017 - Apr 2022
MRtrix3 module for motion correction and scattered slice reconstruction in multi-shell diffusion MRI.
Contributions:416 commits, 11 PRs, 18 pushes in 5 years 1 month
reconstructionpythonsliceoptical-flowmotion
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.