My name is Brent Huisman, working as a Postdoc in radiotherapy. Here I use Monte Carlo tools to estimate the in-vivo dose to every patient based on logged data, such as linac-logs and the CT of the day. Earlier, I earned a PhD in particle therapy, on the subject of prompt gammas for treatment verification. Here I developed and validated a variance reduction technique, which was implemented in Gate/Geant4. I’ve got a master’s degree in particle physics, and within my master's thesis I worked on proton computed tomography.
As a student representative and as board member of a study association, I learned what a good team can accomplish. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time as treasurer, secretary of an event with the top strategy consultants of the world and co-organizing a symposium featuring a Nobel prize winner.
I like life, the universe and everything. The workings of our universe, our globe and its thin top layer with us humans in it: wow! Besides hiking, reading, cooking and bothering others, I like to spend time on computer hardware, writing small software tools (in Python, C++, even Java) and design of this website (HTML, CSS, even Javascript). Of particular interest to me are free software and free information. This website serves as a sandbox and public display of such endeavours.
Things I Create
- Research – a short overview of past and present research activities.
- Dosia – a viewer for Dicom plans/doses/CTs, and with a component to calculate dose independently.
- medimage – wrote a library that represents a few image file formats common in medical research as Python numpy arrays.
- Gate – contributed code to the open source Monte Carlo tool Gate, used for the simulation of photon and particle therapy and imaging. My main contribution is the PromptGammaTLE actor, which speeds up the convergence of the prompt gamma signal by a factor of 1000.
- par2deep – Produce, verify and repair par2 files recursively.
- lastfmtagupdater – Update your music files with tags from Last.FM.
- phd_tools – Set of tools to work with Gate outputs (MHD image class, RTPlan class, plot functions) and scripts to process and view such data.
- PySPARC – a Python implementation for data acquisition with a HiSPARC DAQ. Helped with performance profiling and wrote the proof of concept from scratch.
- Photography – check out my photos on Flickr, check my blog for posts tagged 'photo'.
Things I Like
- Music – r/mu-chill, r/mu-energy, Deadmau5, Jaytech, Kygo.
- Reading – apart from my news feeds, these blogs are always interesting: Strange Maps, Low Tech Magazine (Dutch) and Ex Urbe.
- Gaming – see what I've been up to on my Steam profile, or here.
- Detecting and correcting fallacies, a full list can be found here.
- Podcasts: Bad Voltage, OVT, Archos, Hardcore History, 99 percent invisible, In Our Time, Radio Doc, This American Life, Revisionist History.
Books I've Read
2018
- D.C. Monahan: The Navigator's Treasure.
- Milo Anstadt: Polen, land, volk, cultuur.
- Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions.
- Herman Koch: Het Diner.
- Femke Halsema: Pluche.
- Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars.
2019
- Jacques Meerman: Kleine geschiedenis van de Nederlandse keuken.
- Franz Kafka: De gedaanteverwisseling (Die Verwandlung).
- Ivan Toergenjev: Vaders en zonen (Отцы и дети).
2020
- Cixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem (三體).
- Larry Niven: Ringworld.
- Emile Zola: De Kroeg (L'Assommoir).