Preis and Mozaffarzadeh winners of the Young Medical Delta thesis awards 2022

Young Medical Delta's Thesis Awards were presented to Louisa Preis (MSc category) for her thesis on a minimally invasive medical device for sentinel lymph node biopsy, and to Moein Mozaffarzadeh (PhD category) for his research on real-time refraction-corrected transcranial ultrasound. 

Many theses and dissertations were submitted this year. All were related to medical technology. Only a few nominees were allowed to present their research to the jury, consisting of Prof. Dr. Aad van der Lugt, Dr. Frans van Nieuwpoort, Dr. Joost van der Sijp and Dr. Qian Tao. Louisa Preis won the MSc category by successfully presenting her work on a minimally invasive medical device for sentinel lymph node biopsy: the 'Preis Device'.

For patients with early-stage cutaneous melanoma (skin cancer), sentinel lymph node biopsy is the current standard to assess the presence of lymph node metastases and eligibility for adjuvant systemic therapy. This procedure is burdensome for both patients (it must be performed under general anesthesia, with 10% morbidity) and healthcare resources (OR capacity, day treatment beds).

Dr. Dirk Grünhagen (oncological surgeon) and Dr. Evalyn Mulder (former PhD student) of the Erasmus MC Cancer Institute asked Dr. John van den Dobbelsteen (Faculty of Biomechanical Engineering) of Delft University of Technology whether it would be possible to perform this procedure under local anesthesia at the outpatient clinic using a handheld medical device. During her internship and as part of her master's thesis, Louisa Preis found a mechanism to remove the entire lymph node and tested it on phantoms that mimic real tissue. In addition, FEM analyses were performed to identify potential failing process steps (failure modes) and simulate phenomena observed during testing.

Clinical practice

Building on promising early results, it is currently in the iteration phase. To optimize the design of this minimally invasive SLNB medical device ("Preis Device"), they are seeking a new master's student. The student will work closely with the Faculty of BioMedical Engineering (TU Delft) and the Department of Medical Technology (Erasmus MC) on production and sterilization. In order to actually use the device in clinical practice, CE certification will also be included in the project. If successful, this new medical device could significantly improve lymph node collection, not only in patients with melanoma.

Lousia Preis also won the audience award with her thesis.

Real-time ultrasound

Moein Mozaffarzadeh won the PhD category after presenting his work on real-time refraction-corrected transcranial ultrasound. Transcranial ultrasound imaging (TUI) is a diagnostic modality with numerous applications. Despite its advantages, TUI is still hampered by low image quality due to strong phase error and multiple scattering through the skull and mode conversion.

In his dissertation, Mozaffarzadeh addresses phase aberration by developing a technique that corrects the true position and true geometry of the bone layer without the need for CT/MR scans. Through a highly efficient ray-tracing approach and GPU implementation, Mozaffarzadeh's approach enabled real-time (i.e., at least 20 frames per second) refraction-corrected TUI. Moreover, he compared the approach with near-field phase modeling (PS) that was successful in correcting phase aberrations during abdominal scanning. The results indicate that our refraction-corrected TUI method outperforms the PS method when an ultrafast multi-angle plane wave sequence is used for transcranial imaging with a single transducer.