Rate My Professor Bart Depreitere

Bart Depreitere is a full professor in the Faculty of Medicine at KU Leuven and a staff neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery at University Hospitals Leuven. He graduated from KU Leuven Medical School in 1997, completed his neurosurgical training in Leuven, and earned his PhD in Medical Sciences from KU Leuven in 2004. Following a fellowship in spine surgery and pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Toronto in 2005-2006, he joined UZ Leuven as a staff neurosurgeon in 2006. He was appointed associate professor in 2013 and full professor in 2018. Depreitere chairs the multidisciplinary spine program at UZ Leuven, which achieved JCI care program certification in 2019 and Eurospine Spine Surgical Center of Excellence accreditation in 2023. He teaches neurosurgery to medical students and spine pathology to physiotherapy students.

His research centers on cerebrovascular autoregulation, biomechanics of traumatic brain injury, and advanced neuromonitoring. Depreitere leads the Leuven Neurotrauma Research Group (L'NRG), utilizing machine learning on physiological monitoring data to predict secondary insults and outcomes in brain injury. He contributes to the IMPACT research group on head trauma biomechanics and founded an international consortium for smart neuromonitoring solutions, securing EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions funding in 2022 for a 10-PhD training program. With over 150 peer-reviewed publications and more than 7,000 citations, notable works include "Unique considerations in the assessment and management of traumatic brain injury in older adults" (The Lancet Neurology, 2025), "KidsBrainIT: Visualization of the Impact of Cerebral Perfusion Pressure Insult Intensity and Duration on Childhood Brain Trauma Outcome" (Neurocritical Care, 2026), and contributions to the CENTER-TBI study on traumatic brain injury outcomes. He holds leadership positions as president of the Belgian Society for Neurosurgery, chairman of the EANS Trauma and Critical Care Section, board member of the EANS Spine Section and Eurospine task forces, and editorial board member for Neurocritical Care and Brain & Spine. Depreitere co-authored the 2017 Belgian Healthcare Knowledge Center guidelines on low back pain and radicular pain care pathways.