During the 7th Congress of the Portuguese Committee of URSI, held on 22 November 2013, Helder Vasconcelos, member of ANACOM's Management Board, presented the ANACOM-URSI Portugal Prize and the Best Student Paper Award, prizes instituted with the aim of encouraging creativity and rigor in scientific research work in Portugal and to encourage young authors.
The ANACOM-URSI Portugal Prize was awarded to Raquel Cruz da Conceição of the Faculty of Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa, for the work "Novel Multimodal PEM-UWB Approach for Breast Cancer Detection and Classification". The author, who completed an integrated Masters in Biomedical Engineering at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, returned to Portugal in 2012 and began post-doctoral studies at the Faculty of Sciences at Universidade de Lisboa with a grant from FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Foundation for Science and Technology). She currently has a Marie Curie fellowship from the FP7 Programme.
Raquel Cruz da Conceição was recently recruited as an assistant visiting professor at the same Faculty of Sciences, and in November 2013 she was elected chair of a COST (TD1301) action programme following acceptance of her proposal to create a network of European researchers collaborating in the development of medical applications in the microwave frequency, as well as in streamlining processes entailed in clinical trials and sale of new medical equipment.
ANACOM offers its congratulations for the award of the 2013 ANACOM-URSI Portugal to Raquel Cruz da Conceição, for a work that stood out not only in terms of quality and scientific rigor but also because of its innovation and the applicability of the proposed techniques to an area of social interest with a strong impact. The paper proposes a multimodal use of two techniques of complementary medical diagnosis. While Positron Emission Mammography gives very reliable results in terms of detecting and locating breast tumours, it does not provide information about the nature of the tumour (i.e. whether it is benign or malignant). Some previous studies have indicated that a microwave image may enable the classification of breast tumours in terms of size and shape, and indication can be obtained as to the nature of the tumour with some degree of certainty. The work is a study entailing a numerical and experimental simulation in a simple scenario, where one breast is simulated with a tumour and tumour classification is undertaken.
The Best Student Paper Award went to Ricardo Manuel Lopes dos Santos, Instituto Superior Técnico (Higher Technical Institute), for the paper "Assessment of Wind Turbines Generators Influence in Aeronautical Radars".
Consult:
- 7th Congress of the Portuguese Committee of URSI - "An ocean without borders: technological challenges" https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1168130
