On wednesday June 5, 2024 Judith defended her thesis named Ultrasound wave-tracking, pushing boundaries for vascular imaging.
In conclusion she found out that there is an urgent need to assess the condition of the vessel wall improve. SWE shows promising results in this regard. It seems like a suitable and patient-friendly way to determine vessel wall stiffness and plaque composition non-invasively. However, there is high variability in SWE values between different ultrasound machines and transducers and SWE values sometimes depend on the measuring depth. A special vascular SWE mode would may offer a solution to reduce this variation and thus the accuracy of this technique for vascular applications. Steps have been taken in this dissertation to develop such a specific vascular SWE mode. However, there is further optimization as well validation is needed to achieve its application in clinical practice.
We congratulate Judith on this extraordinary achievement!