Cene Jerele

I am a diagnostic and interventional neuroradiologist at the Clinical Institute of Radiology, University Medical Centre Ljubljana, and a doctoral student here at KI. My thesis concerns white matter and cholinergic pathway pathology in dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), carried out as a collaboration between KI and UKC Ljubljana together with Prof. Milica Gregorič Kramberger. I came to research from clinical neuroradiology rather than from neuroscience, and I am interested in the heterogeneity that is obvious in the clinic but tends to disappear once patients are pooled into diagnostic groups — and in the research infrastructure needed to capture it properly.

My doctoral project examines cholinergic white matter pathology in DLB and related Lewy body disorders, with a focus on cerebrovascular contribution, using the CHIPS scale, diffusion tractography of the cholinergic projection systems, and combined FDG-PET and MRI. The underlying question is whether white matter change along these pathways is incidental vascular co-pathology or part of the disease process itself, and what that means for clinical phenotype. Clinically I work in neurointervention, and my research is developing in that direction as well, towards registry-based imaging and outcome work in cerebrovascular disease.

I teach medical students at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, where I hold the academic rank of asistent (Assistant — the University of Ljubljana teaching rank below Assistant Professor). Teaching neuroradiology has sharpened my own research thinking, and keeps my work anchored to how imaging is actually read and used in clinical practice.