About
Introduction
Theo van Walsum graduated in Informatics at the TU Delft in 1990. In 1995 he received his PhD on flow visualization at the Scientific Visualization Group of TU Delft. After one year at the LKEB (LUMC), where he started working on image processing, he became a Post-doc at the Image Sciences Institute (UMC Utrecht). There he developed his interest in improving image guidance, and worked on several projects where rotational imaging was used for image guidance.
He got a position at the BIGR group at the Erasmus MC in February 2005 where he is heading the “Image Guidance in Interventions and Therapy” theme group. This group focusses on improving image guidance by integrating pre-operative image information in the interventional situation for cardiovascular and abdominal applications. He is also involved in cardiovascular image processing; he co-organized three cardiovascular “Grand Challenges” and organizes the MICCAI workshops on medical imaging and stroke.
Field(s) of expertise
- image guidance
- surgical navigation
- quantitative imaging biomarkers
- cardiovascular biomedical imaging
- software engineering and programming
Education and career
Publications
Recent Findings
Previous studies in the lab have shown that autologous dendritic cells pulsed with allogenic tumor cell lysate was able to induce peripheral T cell activation and tumor-reactive T cell responses in patients with mesothelioma and pancreatic cancer. Current research focuses on how to initiate an effective immune response in the tumor as well as the tumor-draining lymph node using dendritic cell vaccination. Furthermore, we are studying novel approaches for (personalized) vaccination. In addition, we have identified T cell characteristics that underlie clinical efficacy of immune check inhibitors or chemotherapeutic agents in mesothelioma. The selected publications below give an impression of our work.
Teaching activities
- Supervision of 11 PhD theses, 20 MSc/BSc thesis.
- Coordinator of "Python Programming" MSc course for Technical Medicine