PhD in Contrast Ultrasound Imaging of Nanobubbles for Cancer Diagnostics

About this position

Want to help replace painful prostate biopsies with smarter ultrasound? Join MOMENTUM, an NWO-funded project developing nanobubble-enhanced ultrasound imaging for cancer diagnostics, and design the pharmacokinetic models and signal analysis methods that turn nanobubble transport into a diagnostic biomarker.

Information

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the Netherlands, and its diagnosis still relies heavily on invasive biopsies. More accurate, noninvasive ultrasound imaging could reduce this burden considerably, but current contrast agents cannot fully capture the abnormal blood vessels that feed a tumor. Nanobubbles, a new generation of ultrasound contrast agent far smaller than those used today, promise to change that by reaching into the tumor tissue itself.

We are looking for a motivated PhD candidate to develop the modeling and signal analysis methods that turn nanobubble ultrasound imaging into a quantitative diagnostic tool. You will work with imaging data acquired from lab-grown vascular models and translate the changes they show over time into pharmacokinetic and spatiotemporal models that describe how nanobubbles move through and beyond the microvasculature. The resulting parameters are candidate biomarkers for tumor angiogenesis, with prostate cancer as the initial clinical focus.

This PhD position is part of MOMENTUM, a project funded by the NWO Open Technology Programme that combines microfluidics, bubble physics, and ultrasound signal processing to bring nanobubble imaging closer to clinical use. You will collaborate closely with a fellow PhD candidate, a postdoc, and a technician working on the other parts of the project at TU/e and the University of Twente, as well as with industrial and clinical partners including Bracco, Angiogenesis Analytics, and the Amsterdam UMC. This position will be embedded in the Biomedical Diagnostics (BM/d) lab (Signal Processing Systems group, Department of Electrical Engineering, TU/e), and you will be supervised daily by dr. Simona Turco ( s.turco@tue.nl ), together with prof. Massimo Mischi.