As we reflect on the past year, we celebrate the exciting scientific achievements that have shaped our work—some of which are subtly referenced in the picture above. Even more, we cherish the diverse and inspiring interactions we’ve shared with clinicians, (basic) scientists, patients, and industry partners.
Today three of our group members joined the Walk and Ride to raise funds for the Oogfonds, the National association for patients with ocular conditions. The Oogfonds is a partner in many of our projects, such as the recently funded development of an ocular cone-beam CT scanner. After a nice lunch, we cycled 83km through the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. A big thank you for all those friends, family and colleagues who supported us!
Today Corné launched Visisipy, our open source platform for vision simulations, at the Visual and Physiological Optics conference in Wroclaw, Polen. Visisipy has been developed as part of the OPENOPTICS project and aims to develop an open toolbox for optical simulations of the eye.
We are excited to share that our application to develop a cone-beam CT scanner for the eyes has been funded as part of the Open Technology Programme of the Dutch Research Council.
Science is great… but so is a little friendly competition every now and then! On Thursday, researchers from the Gorter Center, including some from the MReye group, showed their athleticism in a cycling race against the MRI research groups from UMC Utrecht and Amsterdam UMC. Each group started in pairs from their own center and raced to the finish line in Nieuwerbrug. A big congrats to the winners from Utrecht! After the race and social ride, everybody could socialize during drinks and dinner. What a fun day!
Today, we attended the Second International PTCOG Ocular Proton Therapy Symposium 2024! We enjoyed the interesting talks, lively discussions and pizza breaks. And of course, we’re very proud of Corné Haasjes, who received the Best Presentation Award for his talk ‘Optical aberration correction of fundus photographs for ocular proton therapy planning’. Later this week, we will travel to Groningen for the annual conference of the Dutch Society of Ophthalmology (Nederlands Oogheelkundig Gezelschap), where many of us will present our latest results.
Every year, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) publishes “Resultaat”, a magazine highlighting last year’s ground-breaking, surprising and above all socially relevant scientific results from the previous year. The 2023 edition features an interview with members of our group on the impact of our MRI technologies on the lives of patients with eye cancer. A nice recognition of the societal relevance of our work!
Three of our scientists (Beenakker, Van Vught and Haasjes) have received an Open Science grant from the Dutch Research Council to stimulate the development of ZOSPy, our open platform for optical simulations. Since we have made ZOSPy available open-source, scientists from various disciplines are using it as a platform to share their methods and make them publicly available. In this project we will add features to ZOSPy that simplify this sharing of methods and results, together with a better documentation. This will allow ZOSPy to become a tool that stimulates the adoption of Open Science for optical simulations.
Today we have had the first User’s Committee meeting of our COMPOSE project. These meetings are common element for projects funded through NWO’s Applied Engineering Sciences domain, and provides potential users, e.g. medical companies and doctors, unique possibilities to utilize technological knowledge at an early stage. For this specific project, representatives from Philips Healthcare, HollandPTC and RaySearch Laboratories, as well as ophthalmologists, radiation oncologists form User’s Committee. During this first meeting, we had a fruitful exchange ideas about the progress of the research and discussed new possibilities for valorization of it’s results.
