Light technology enables non- and minimally invasive sensing of tissue properties and can thereby improve diagnostic routines. Light technology is promising for many aspects of disease management, including early diagnosis, image-guided surgery, and remote patient monitoring. TNO collaborates with the VU, university hospitals and several industrial partners in the field of optical sensing and diagnostics to explore and exploit light-tissue interactions for health applications.
My chair at the VU focuses on the development and clinical validation of new optical diagnostic methods, with an emphasis on the interpretation of data generated by optical measurement systems based on the modelling of light transport in biological tissues. A good understanding of how light behaves in biological tissues makes it possible to convert measured optical signals into physical parameters that are of diagnostic value. Central to the research is the back of the eye, the retina. By shining light on the retina in different ways and with different colors and measuring the reflected light, we try to look in detail at blood vessels and nerve cells in a non-invasive way. In this way, I aim to detect eye diseases as well as cardiovascular and neurological disorders at an earlier stage.
Academic Background
Prof. Amelink got his MSc degree in Experimental Physics from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in 1995, with a focus on atomic physics. He received his PhD degree from the Atom Optics Group at Utrecht University in 2000, where he studied collisions between laser-cooled sodium atoms. After 1 year of employment as Research Scientist at Philips Research in Eindhoven, he became a post-doc at the Center for Optical Diagnostics and Therapy (CODT) at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. After receiving a VIDI grant in 2005 he was appointed Assistant Professor at the CODT where he worked until 2014. Since 2014 he works in the Optics expertise group of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO in Delft, as scientific lead of the Medical Photonics research program. As of 2019 he is an endowed professor at the VU University Amsterdam, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Biophotonics and Medical Imaging Group.
