This project develops a new hardware module that drastically improves the temporal resolution of current patch-clamp from the microsecond domain to the picosecond domain. The hardware module can be attached to a commercially available AFM (atomic force microscopy) platform, as well as a commercially available microwave generator. The new module has both scientific impact to...
Head and neck cancers represent the 6th most common type of cancer in Europe with around 150,000 new patients per year. Despite its severity and increasing prevalence, there is little awareness of this pathology. 60% of patients with advanced disease at diagnosis die within 5 years. The most common cancer in the head and neck...
Malodours produced by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are an expanding concern as cities surround these facilities. Malodours lower citizens’ quality of life by undesired odour exposure and nuisance, and may negatively impact tourism. Odours are the main cause of pollution perception, together with dust and noise. In particular, WWTPs produce gaseous emissions that might be...
Nowadays, mammography screening is the most effective tool to fight breast cancer. Still, more than 30% of cancers are not detected, in particular in case of dense breast tissue. Today, X-ray detectors for mammography are optimised for resolution but still lack in sensitivity if compared to angiography systems. Reason is the different technology they rely on. Mammography is...
Medical X-ray imaging improvements contribute to better diagnosis and treatments of many medical conditions. The next breakthrough in radiography will be X-ray spectral imaging, which will make it possible to distinguish much better between the different types of biological tissues of patients’ organs than current imaging techniques. Thus, these highly precise medical imaging based on chemical contrasts will deliver...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely predicted to cause a profound technological and societal transformation, on a par with the technological innovations of microelectronics and the internet that will underpin it. The number of IoT devices increased 31% year-on-year to reach 8.4 billion by 2017, and it is estimated that there will be in excess of...
Last decade strong technological effort provided the availability on the market of cheap chips integrating a full 77 GHz radar system, including the RF and the signal processing sections, which potentially offer an infinite variety of applications beyond the original one, i.e., automotive safety and autonomous drive. However an analogous effort on the radar antenna is yet to...
Cancer is the second leading cause for death worldwide. A current trend in medicine demands to develop minimal-invasive optical imaging techniques to visually determine lesion boundaries. If such a device was available, the current 2-step procedure of biopsy and follow-up analysis of stained tissue under the microscope by the pathologist could be replaced by a...
A photocathode is a thin multilayer, usually deposited onto a transparent glass window. Its function is to absorb soft (visual) photons entering through the window, and to subsequently emit a detectable photoelectron into the adjacent vacuum. The probability that an incoming soft photon results in the emission of a photoelectron never exceeded 40%. With this high risk/high impact...
