For the third time I went to the SPIE Medical Imaging conference, being held this year in Orlando, Florida. The meeting was from 6-12 February 2009 at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Lake Buena Vista. It is one of my favourite conferences, as it has an overall informal character, which enables one to network and share ideas among colleagues in the field. This year I’ve presented my work at a different session than usually, in the Image Perception, Observer Performance and Technology Assessment session. It was a very sunny week, and we had also opportunities to relax and enjoy the nice weather and food.
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I recently returned from a fabulous, but much too short vacation in snowy Norway. I flew to Oslo from Dusseldorf and made a long train trip from Oslo to Trondheim to finally meet my girlfriend face to face, who I have met six months ago by pure coincidence. Six days were far too short, to explore one of the most beautiful countries on Earth, with beautiful mountains, fjords, waterfalls and other great nature. I’ll certainly will return to see the beautiful scenes of Bergen, Lofoten, Stavanger, and many more places. Nevertheless, even in that short time I got a fairly good taste of the best things Norway has to offer, and my first real uphill skiing experience in the mountains was one of the best experiences I had in my life. Combined with meeting the girl of my dreams, it was certainly an unforgettable vacation.

See here some of the photo’s

Woohoo! After an exhausting but successful week at the RSNA, it was time to free my mind and experience everything Chicago has to offer in 7 days. So I bought a Chicago CityPass booklet which gives access to the 5 most popular attractions (very recommended), rented a 4WD car and stayed at the affordable Motel 6 in Glenview, Chicago. It was quite cold, but nevertheless I’ve really enjoyed my stay.

Click here to see the gallery.

I attended world’s biggest radiology conference in Chicago, Illinois to present our interactive CAD system for detection of masses in mammograms. The technical exhibit was a great success, more than 110 people have done (part of) the observer experiment – and the comments about using CAD in a different way were overall very positive.

Click here to get the exhibit posters, and AuntMinnie’s Insider Exclusive article.

Click here to see some photo’s.

I have been to the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference 2007 held in San Diego, California to give a presentation about breast lesion classification, and extended it with a pleasure trip around California with a couple of friends.

Click here to see the map and gallery.

Yesterday, I received an email from Marko van Eekelen, president of the AIA Awards jury that I won the AIA Masters Award of the academic year 05/06 for my Master Thesis! I’m very honored, and this award mades me even more proud of my work. At December 15th there will be an official ceremony where I present a part of my thesis.

Some sources that published the press release:
Radboud University newsitem (dutch)
Press Center (dutch)

Breast cancer is the most common life-threatening type of cancer affecting women in The Netherlands. The success of the treatment of breast cancer largely depends on the stage of a tumor at the time of detection. Therefore, early detection of breast cancer is essential. Although mammography screening is currently the most effective tool for early detection of breast cancer, up to one-fifth of women with invasive breast cancer have a mammogram that is interpreted as normal, i.e., a false-negative mammogram result. To overcome such limitations, Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems for automatic classification of breast lesions as either benign or malignant are being developed. CAD systems help radiologists with the interpretation of lesions, such that they refer less women for further examination when they actually have benign lesions. In this thesis we constructed several types of classifiers, i.e., Bayesian networks and support vector machines, for the task of computer-aided diagnosis of breast lesions.

Classification of Breast Lesions in Digital Mammograms, Master Thesis (1.3 MB PDF)

I spent three weeks visiting the United Arabic Emirates and Oman with a good friend from 20 May to 10 June 2006 arriving in Dubai and travelling to Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Umm al-Qaiwan and Abu Dhabi. The second half of our trip took us to the hottest capital of the world: Muscat, Oman. Here is the travel report from day to day, with links to the photos. And the full gallery is here.