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discovered_01_2015

PORTRAIT// THE HZDR RESEARCH MAGAZINE WWW.HZDR.DE 28 29 ‘Ok, if we get bored at weekends or on public holidays, then we work on an interesting article,’ Esther Troost admits with a sidelong glance at her partner. Their offices are on the same floor and even back home in the Netherlands they spent many hours together on scientific questions. When she talks about her research, everything changes, not just her expression but the timbre of her voice. Suddenly the two of them are defining their own standards, analyzing radiation doses, classifying imaging modalities, and evaluating the impact of magnetic fields on a beam of charged particles. ‘Esther’s the woman for tumors in the head and thorax,’ says Aswin Hoffmann, and ‘he’s more the one for the pelvis,’ the professor interjects. Whether this division carries over into private life is anyone’s guess. Esther Troost’s field is medicine; Aswin Hoffmann devotes his time to medical physics. Working to the power of two ‘For a medical physicist like me there’s quite a lot of routine work to be done here in Germany,’ says Hoffmann. ‘In the Netherlands, the areas of work are defined quite differently. Think of dosimetrists, for example. Back home, they are responsible for radiotherapy planning and quality control measurements.‘ Consequently, medical physicists have more scope for research and running innovative projects in the Netherlands. Here in Germany, Hoffmann has to work much harder to find a niche, although in his particular case, things are working out extremely well because his work in Dresden stands on two pillars: 60 percent of his time is spent as the head of a research group – at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, where he is employed in the Institute of Radiooncology – and 40 percent as a medical physicist at Dresden University Hospital. Both jobs focus on integrating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in radiotherapy, which is why he looks on his dual career as a real opportunity. ‘With my research group, I want to integrate real-time imaging into proton therapy. This would allow us to determine and monitor precisely where the radiation dose is deposited in the patient’s body while the treatment is being performed.’ In the next ten years, the researcher hopes to combine MRI and proton beam therapy in one and the same piece of equipment. If he is successful, it really would be a world premiere. ‘At the moment, we are still right at the beginning. We just have ideas but don’t know whether they are technically feasible,’ he says, choosing his words carefully. ‘But we have to give it a try.’ If the innovative plan works, it would be a significant step on the way to providing patients with more precise and effective cancer therapy. ‘If you just propel the proton beam into the MRI’s magnetic field, the beam of positively charged particles is deflected. This is precisely what we would have to work out when calculating the dose distribution.’ The final goal will be to integrate the MRI and the proton therapy unit. Here in Dresden the ground had already been prepared for a challenge of this kind, the researcher soon realized. ‘It certainly has. In the Netherlands we don’t have a constellation like this with the OncoRay Center and its partners, HZDR, the University Hospital and TU Dresden. It’s a perfect environment for both of us to utilize theoretical research potential for clinical purposes, as well.’ This was also what motivated Esther Troost to move several hundred miles east. ‘Sure, the whole package, the colleagues, the professorship, the visionary boss – these were all good reasons for moving.’ In the end, it was an easy decision for both of them because if you want to tread new scientific ground, a change of scenery is part of everyday life together. ‘Sometimes you have to be careful not to let everything revolve around the job – but we manage quite well to give our brains an airing when we take our two dogs out walking along the Elbe river in the early morning.’ Understanding tumors better Esther Troost focusses on imaging. ‘Here on the medical campus, we now are benefitting from HZDR’s combined unit that brings together anatomical information from MRI with metabolic information from positron-emission-tomography (PET) imaging.’ Now, the medical scientist with the optimistic smile can almost constantly access countless patient records so that she and her colleagues in nuclear medicine and radiology at the University Hospital and the HZDR group around the physicist Jörg van den Hoff as well as other OncoRay colleagues can drive imaging in cancer research. ‘It‘s fascinating! I’m sure progress in imaging will bring about long-term changes in cancer therapy,’ says Troost. If you had not realized before, this is the moment when it becomes clear why Dresden is such an interesting base for the two scientists. ‘In the past, you just had an X-ray showing the rough contours of the tumor. Then the patients were Radiation oncologist and scientist Esther Troost is convinced that progress in imaging will bring about long-term changes in cancer therapy.

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