Case Studies

Around 22.6 million people in the EU live with untreated, disabling hearing loss. As well as its social effects it also costs the European economy around €185 billion each year, €25 billion more than the EU budget for 2018. In Germany four to five million workers are exposed to harmful occupational noise and the German social a...

In Europe 1 in 8 women develop breast cancer before the age of 85, and early diagnosis increases survival chances. National x-ray screening programmes are being introduced throughout the EU, underpinned by a measurement traceability hierarchy to ensure the quality of the services provided. This includes checking that EU safety ...

Hearing defects in a child’s early years leads to language development problems, so national health authorities run programmes to identify affected babies and young children. Testing uses small headsets to provide a known sound stimulation, then measures the response in the infant’s ear or brain. The small headsets currently u...

Treating cancerous tumours with radiotherapy requires precisely targeted treatments to be delivered directly to the cancerous cells without harming surrounding healthy tissue. For example with facilities like gamma knife, up to 200 low power beams, which individually do little harm can be focused to a single area of just a few ...

High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU), used with imaging techniques, is a promising new treatment of prostate cancer and brain disorders. It focuses multiple high energy soundwaves onto a single spot, generating enough heat to destroy a tumour. Unlike ionising radiation, these beams do not cause long term harm to DNA, and in...

For many years molecular radiotherapy (MRT) has been used for palliative care of cancer patients, but it has great potential to become a potent first line cancer treatment. The therapy uses radioactive drugs to target specific tumour locations, for example by injection of radioactive microspheres into tumours in the liver via i...