I am a PhD student at the Academic Medical Center, where I perform research on imaging techniques to diagnose prostate cancer. A travel grant from the Netherlands' Society for Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering enabled me to visit the Wellman Center for Photomedicine in Boston (part of Harvard and Massachusetts’s General Hospital) for three months.
One of the techniques I had been working on at the Academic Medical Center is Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). To be able to validate OCT as a diagnostic technique, it has to be compared to the current gold standard – histology. This requires accurate co-registration between the OCT images and the location of the tissue used for histology. However, OCT images can have a type of distortion called Non-Uniform Rotational Distortions (NURD). This results in images not being exactly where they would be expected. Correcting for NURD would thus improve the co-registration between OCT and histology.
Since The Wellman Center for Photomedicine had recently developed a method to correct for NURD in a similar (but different) setting, I was invited to collaborate and develop a new method for our specific purposes.
In those three months, I did not only work on this method, but I got to experience what it is like to work in an American research group and I learned about the different subjects of everyone in our lab. Also, I am confident that my lab visit will inspire further collaboration between our groups. I would like to thank the VvB-BMT for making my visit to the Wellman Center possible.