"I met the designer of the software I was using at a conference in Italy. I told him about the issue I was struggling with, and he called me back from the train the very next day with a solution. He would eventually even co-author one of my papers about radiotherapy. Patients who receive radiotherapy often get a Cone Beam CT scan before they start their treatment. This scan helps radiation oncologists with the precise positioning on the radiation machine. But that data has so much more potential. The only roadblock was that the image quality wasn’t good enough. The advantage of Cone Beam CT is that you can adjust the energy levels. By using different voltages to create scans and then combining them, we can enhance the quality of the image. Thanks to this improvement in quality, radiation oncologists are now able to use these scans to verify whether patients are receiving the correct radiation dose. If necessary, they can adjust the treatment plan at any time. This is how fundamental physics can truly make a difference for patients. This is exactly what brought me to Amsterdam after my Particle Physics studies in Dresden. I wanted to make a difference. And now I’m doing exactly that at TU Delft, where I’m working on a detector for nuclear medicine."
Lukas Schröder will defend his thesis on November 27.
Research at the Netherlands Cancer Institute is financially supported by KWF Dutch Cancer Society.
prof. dr. ir. J.J. Sonke
L.S. Ploeger