I’m Marco Mauritz and I work as a doctoral student at the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the WWU.
I’m involved with medical imaging, specifically with its mathematical aspects.
You can picture it this way: when you’re being scanned in a CT or MRT device,
data is recorded by detectors, and for the human eye, this data
is not recognisable as actual images. To get a concrete image, you have to first
carry out some very complicated calculations, for which you need a lot of mathematics.
And that’s the kind of work I do. My subject area is not CT or MRT imaging,
but rather positron emission tomography – which is another method used in medical imaging.
And we want to use it to capture the activity of individual cells.
The cellular immunotherapy that we’re trying to improve works by using the body’s own immune system
to fight cancer, in other words, we don’t apply radiation or chemotherapy
but rather the body’s immune cells. To do this, they are first extracted,
then genetically altered to specifically recognise and ideally destroy the cancer cells.
This works relatively well with leukaemia, but not so well with solid tumours.
So we want to find out why it’s not working,
or how we could improve it. I think it’s interesting to help people gain a better
understanding of the human body, and develop and improve new cancer therapies.
I find it extremely fascinating to be involved in an interdisciplinary project
and collaborate with people from a relatively wide range of disciplines.
From the area of medical imaging, biotechnology and medicine.