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Aimee wins the UFW thesis prize in the domain Agrotechnology and Food
Aimee Kok, MSc student at PCC, is one of the winners of the thesis prize of the University Funds Wageningen. She did her master thesis under the supervision of Jesse Buijs and Jasper van der Gucht
In her thesis, Aimee worked on an optical imaging technique called Laser Speckle Imaging (LSI). This is a technique that has been developed in the medical field to image, for example, blood flows and vascular dynamics, and that has been further developed in our group for use in materials science, for example to study mechanical stresses in materials, to image flows, or as a tool that can help in the restauration of artworks. However, a severe limitation of the current method is that it can only give two-dimensional information, while all information in the third (depth) direction is averaged out.
Aimee took up the challenging task to develop, for the first time, a three-dimensional LSI method. For this she needed to derive a theoretical framework to describe the propagation of light in strongly scattering samples, and then develop a reconstruction algorithm that would allow to obtain a 3D map of the dynamics in the material from the optical signal. This was mathematically extremely challenging, but Aimee succeeded and she was able to demonstrate, using artificial samples, that her 3D-reconstruction method worked very well.
Her theoretical results and the algorithm that she developed thus pave the way for the first experimental 3D-LSI set-up, which will open up completely new applications of the technique, for example in deep tissue imaging and diagnostics. Congratulations Aimee, and we wish you all the best in your future career!