January 20, 2025: Franca auf der Heiden has successfully defended her PhD thesis “High-Speed Multi-Modal Scattering Polarimetry for Nerve Fiber Imaging” with distinction. We congratulate Franca on this great work and wish her all the best for her future career!

January 9, 2025: The Dutch Research Council has granted our proposal “Enhancing Brain Cancer Surgery: Visualizing Tumor Boundaries and Nerve Pathways with Back-Scattered Light”. In total, 28 from 327 eligible proposals received funding. The ENW-XS grant encourages curiosity-driven research that involves the exploration of a promising idea. We want to explore the use of back-scattered light imaging to visualize fiber networks in brain tissue and tumor samples.

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December 18, 2024: The Dutch Research Council has granted our proposal “AI-Driven Cancer Diagnostics: Explainable and Transparent AI Tools for Personalized Treatment”. With the subsidies from the National Growth Fund AiNed XS Europe, promising ideas and innovative and speculative initiatives in the artificial intelligence domain can be explored. We want to use machine learning approaches to enable automated tissue classification and tumor delineation in cancer tissues measured with scattered light microscopy.

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October 15, 2024: Mark Vermeulen has joined the Menzel Lab as PhD student. He will focus on the theoretical analysis and image processing of scattering signals. Specifically, he will work on developing a model for the reliability of reconstructed fiber orientations. He will also investigate various ways to retrieve more information from the scattering patterns. This includes using machine learning to classify tissue types, and using multi-wavelength measurements to estimate fiber diameters.

Mark studied Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at the TU Delft, receiving his bachelor’s degrees in 2022. His master’s in Applied Physics, also at the TU Delft, focused on medical imaging and MRI physics.

October 10, 2024: The Medical Delta program Cancer diagnostics for sustainable health care (CARES) has been launched, of which Miriam Menzel is one of the program leaders. CARES is a transdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from TU Delft, Erasmus MC, LUMC, and The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

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October 7, 2024: Loes Ettema gave a presentation at the NWO Biophysics in Veldhoven, the annual Dutch conference on physics of life, about visualizing collagen fiber networks in bone and tendon with computational scattered light imaging.

September 19, 2024: Loes Ettema has won the “Best Poster Presentation” at the Dutch Photonics Event 2024 in The Hague.

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August & September, 2024: Two new Master students – Vincent den Ronden and Ines Suarez Rodriguez – and two new Bachelor students – Ruben Mak and Wester Stienstra – have joined the Menzel Lab. Vincent, Wester, and Ruben are students of the Applied Physics program at TU Delft. Ines is a guest student of Biomedical Engineering from the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Vincent will study the scattering of polarized light. Ines will analyze the cross-linking of fibers in different tissues (nerve, collagen, muscle). Wester will explore machine learning approaches to improve the interpretation of scattering signals. Ruben will continue working on the 3D-nanoprinting project.

May & June, 2024: Govert Leijdens and Puck Dekkers have joined the Menzel Lab. They are both students of the Applied Physics Bachelor’s program at TU Delft and will work on their end projects.

Govert will work on integrating ComSLI into an off-the-shelf polarization microscope. Puck will continue working on the 3D-nanoprinting project for improved fiber reconstruction with ComSLI.

April 11, 2024: Simon van Staalduine and Pim van Beeck presented posters at the BioDay organized by the Delft Bioengineering Institute.