October 28, 2013
The FOM Valorisation Prize 2013 has been awarded to professor Freek Beekman, researcher at Delft University of Technology. “He provides direction and momentum to technical and economic improvements in medical scanning equipment”, says the jury.
Beekman: two medical scans in one
Beekman is a gifted researcher, who develops physical models and uses these to improve software of radiodiagnostic equipment. As a result of this, medical scans – such as SPECT and PET – can gain a higher resolution and have fewer artefacts. Beekman has also done research into focusing techniques that allow a very high signal strength to be obtained from specific organs or tumors. According to the jury, Beekman is capable of ‘pushing back the boundaries of the technology in several areas at once and can therefore realize impressive products in the highly competitive international field’.
Beekman converts his fundamental discoveries into new measurement instruments as quickly as possible. He already has 13 families of patents to his name and the company he set up, Molecular Imaging Labs (MILabs), now has a multi-million euros turnover. “His activities have therefore had a clear economic impact”, says the jury. Furthermore, his research is also directly useful for society. For example, he has produced equipment with which several scans can be carried out at once: a PET and a SPECT scan. Such a combined device results in quicker analyses of a higher quality and is also cheaper than the traditional techniques. It allows different biological processes to be examined at the same time, for example, the quantity of medicine administered and how a tumour responds to this.
The FOM Valorisation Prize aims to encourage the utilization of knowledge from physics research. The prize worth 250.000 euros is awarded each year to a Dutch researcher (or research group) within the field of physics who has successfully managed to make the results from his or her own research useful for society. Beekman will use the prize to further develop his scanning techniques. “I also want to use the prize money to encourage international collaborations between industry and science”, says Beekman.
Source: www.fom.nl
About the prize: www.fom.nl/prizes