The Foundation of the Oldenburgischen Landesbank grants the OLB Science Award for outstanding dissertations, including a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize for a doctoral thesis. The competition is open to graduates of the officially recognized universities and colleges in the Northwestern region of Germany, whose works are qualitatively outstanding.

The award ceremony was held in the Laboratory Theater in Oldenburg by Prof. Dr. Jurgen Mittelstrass from the University of Konstanz on January 30, 2013.

In the awarded work, methods for risk assessment of liver operations are presented. With the help of the developed software, surgeons can analyze in detail necessary safety margins between tumors and surrounding vessels before surgery, and draw conclusions about the residual liver volume. Within the work an interactive 3-D visualization of potentially compromised regions of the liver was developed that supports the surgeon‘s therapy decision for the patient.

The transfer of these technologies from academic research to clinical practice was a primary goal of this work. A high value was placed therefore on the cooperation with surgeons who accompanied the development of the described methods in the context of clinically-oriented studies.