Andre Dekker, PhD
Head Medical Physicist, MAASTRO Clinic
Professor and Chair Clinical Science Data, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
“BIG DATA IN RADIATION ONCOLOGY”
Date: Thursday, January 19
Location: North Hospital 2002
Time: Lecture 3:00-4:00 PM, 4:30 – 5:30 PM reception and townhall discussion in the Medical Physics lounge in Hock Plaza
Prof. Andre Dekker is a board-certified medical physicist at MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht, The Netherlands since 2005. He has been the head of Medical Physics until 2009 and then led for numerous years the department of Information and Services that manages medical informatics and ICT. He is now responsible for all Research and Education activities at the hospital. He was appointed as a full professor at Maastricht University in 2015 where he holds the chair “Clinical Data Science”.
From 2008, he started and is the principal investigator of the GROW-Maastricht University research division of MAASTRO Knowledge Engineering. His research focuses on two main themes: 1) global data sharing infrastructures; 2) machine learning on this data for decision support systems. The main scientific breakthrough has been the development of a Semantic Web and ontology based data sharing and distributed learning infrastructure that does not require data to leave the hospital. This has reduced many of the ethical and other barriers to share data.
Prof. Dekker has authored over 90 publications (h-index 37) in peer reviewed journals covering informatics, imaging, radiotherapy, tissue optics and heart disease and holds multiple awarded patents. He has held visiting scientist appointments at the Christie Hospital NHS trust; University of Sydney Australia; Liverpool and Macarthur Cancer therapy centers Australia; Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District Australia; Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, Italy; Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, USA, Varian Medical Systems, USA and the Princess Margaret Hospital in Canada.