Cécile Jeukens
Assistant Professor
Dr Cécile Jeukens completed her masters Physics degree cum laude in 1999 at the Radboud University Nijmegen after which she obtained her PhD on optical properties of nanostructures in 2005 at the same university. From 2004 to 2006, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Radiotherapy department of UMC Utrecht on the topic of dynamic contrast enhanced MR and CT of prostate cancer. After her residency to become a medical physicist (Elkerliek hospital Helmond, 2006-2010), she worked as a medical physicist at the department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine from 2010 until present.
As a medical physicist her focus is on x-ray equipment, supervisor of the medical physicist residents and education. Also, she is the radiation protection expert of the hospital with specialty x-rays, manager of the radiation protection officers and head of the dosimetry center. As a researcher her focus is on in computed tomography (CT) and mammography and she collaborates with researchers locally as well as nationally and internationally.
The use of ionising radiation for medical imaging leads to the exposure of patients and staff members to potentially harmful radiation. Her research aims to prevent these adverse effects by optimising the benefit/risk-ratio of medical imaging, in particular in photon counting detector computed tomography (CT) and mammography. Opportunities for risk reduction arise from assessing the actual radiation exposure of patients and staff members, whereas innovation and optimisation of imaging techniques leads to increased benefits.
For CT, her approach is using big data analysis both in a local and international setting to gain insight how to improve CT-protocols with respect to the balance between image quality and radiation exposure. She has developed software to assess subjective image quality more reliably and to automatically assess the objective image quality of clinical CT-examinations. Next steps involve large scale image quality monitoring for optimisation studies and quality control purposes.
In mammography, she has great expertise on an innovative imaging technique called Contrast-Enhanced Mammography (CEM) implemented at the MUMC+ as early as 2013. It is important that the quality of CEM images in general is constant and reliable, for which she has developed a vendor neutral quality program using a new phantom developed by her, and additionally she is working on using AI for quality monitoring on clinical images.
