I’ve always been interested in making medical care more intelligent, accessible, and humane through machine learning. Over time, my focus has expanded beyond accuracy alone – toward understanding how we can design machine learning models that earn and preserve human trust. As a researcher and PhD student at DFKI, I contribute to the AnoMed project, where I work at the intersection of fundamental research on differential privacy and real medical challenges.
 My current research explores the intersection of machine learning, differential privacy, and representation learning:
Most recent publications on Google
Scholar.
‡ indicates equal contribution.
Task-aware multiple instance learning for stress detection from facial video data
Nele Sophie Brügge, Alexandra Korda, Heinz Handels, Giorgos Giannakakis
Journal of Affective Disorders, 2026.
Bag-Level Multiple Instance Learning for Acute Stress Detection from Video Data
Nele Sophie Brügge, Alexandra Korda, Stefan Borgwardt, Christina Andreou, Giorgos Giannakakis, Heinz Handels
International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF) 2025.
Towards Privacy and Utility in Tourette Tic Detection Through Pretraining Based on Publicly Available Video Data of Healthy Subjects
Nele Sophie Brügge, Esfandiar Mohammadi, Alexander Münchau, Tobias Bäumer, Christian Frings, Christian Beste, Veit Roessner, Heinz Handels
ICASSP 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2023.
Automated Motor Tic Detection: A Machine Learning Approach
Nele Sophie Brügge, Gesine Marie Sallandt, Ronja Schappert, Frédéric Li, Alina Siekmann, Marcin Grzegorzek, Tobias Bäumer, Christian Frings, Christian Beste, Roland Stenger, Veit Roessner, Sebastian Fudickar, Heinz Handels, Alexander Münchau
Movement Disorders, vol. 38, no. 7, pp. 1327-1335, 2023.
Multi-Task Gaussian Process Regression for the Detection of Sleep Cycles in Premature Infants
Nele Sophie Brügge, Jan Graßhoff, Arne Weigenand, Philipp Rostalski
ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 1341-1345, 2022.
Revealing Eye-dentity: Foundation Models Enable Re-identification from Retinal OCT
Marc S Seibel, Nele Brügge<>, Timo Kepp, Bennet Kahrs, Jan Ehrhardt, Heinz Handels
Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin 2026: Proceedings, German Conference on Medical Image Computing, Luebeck, 2026
Task-aware multiple instance learning for stress detection from facial video data
Nele Sophie Brügge, Alexandra Korda, Heinz Handels, Giorgos Giannakakis
Journal of Affective Disorders, 2026.
Eye Blinking Abnormalities in Tourette Syndrome: Blink More or Blink Differently?
Julius Verrel, Ronja Schappert, Nele Sophie Brügge, Tina Rawish, Tobias Bäumer, Yifan Hao, Roland Stenger, Christian Beste, Sebastian Fudickar, Veit Roessner, Alexander Münchau
Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, 2025
Bag-Level Multiple Instance Learning for Acute Stress Detection from Video Data
Nele Sophie Brügge, Alexandra Korda, Stefan Borgwardt, Christina Andreou, Giorgos Giannakakis, Heinz Handels
International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF) 2025.
Automated Video-Based Approach for the Diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome
Ronja Schappert, Julius Verrel, Nele Sophie Brügge, Frédéric Li, Theresa Paulus, Leonie Becker, Tobias Bäumer, Christian Beste, Veit Roessner, Sebastian Fudickar, Alexander Münchau
Movement Disorders Clinical Practice, vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 1136-1140, 2024.
Analysis of Facial Expressions Recorded from Patients During Psychiatric Interviews
Lea Mineur, Marco Heide, Sofia Eickhoff, Mihai Avram, Léon Franzen, Frederike Buschmann, Frederike Schröpfer, Helena Rogg, Christina Andreou, Nele Sophie Brügge, Heinz Handels, Stefan Borgwardt, Alexandra Korda
medRxiv, 2024.09.19.24313994, 2024.
Towards Privacy and Utility in Tourette Tic Detection Through Pretraining Based on Publicly Available Video Data of Healthy Subjects
Nele Sophie Brügge, Esfandiar Mohammadi, Alexander Münchau, Tobias Bäumer, Christian Frings, Christian Beste, Veit Roessner, Heinz Handels
ICASSP 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2023.
Automated Motor Tic Detection: A Machine Learning Approach
Nele Sophie Brügge, Gesine Marie Sallandt, Ronja Schappert, Frédéric Li, Alina Siekmann, Marcin Grzegorzek, Tobias Bäumer, Christian Frings, Christian Beste, Roland Stenger, Veit Roessner, Sebastian Fudickar, Heinz Handels, Alexander Münchau
Movement Disorders, vol. 38, no. 7, pp. 1327-1335, 2023.
Extended Head Pose Estimation on Synthesized Avatars for Determining the Severity of Cervical Dystonia
Roland Stenger, Sebastian Löns, Feline Hamami, Nele Sophie Brügge, Tobias Bäumer, Sebastian Fudickar
HEALTHINF 2023, pp. 354-359, 2023.
Multi-Task Gaussian Process Regression for the Detection of Sleep Cycles in Premature Infants
Nele Sophie Brügge, Jan Graßhoff, Arne Weigenand, Philipp Rostalski
ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 1341-1345, 2022.
Forked Recurrent Neural Network for Hand Gesture Classification Using Inertial Measurement Data
Philipp Koch, Nele Sophie Brügge, Huy Phan, Marco Maass, Alfred Mertins
ICASSP 2019 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2019.