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Cord blood banks are being developed in the United States and Europe. In The Netherlands, the EuroCord Nederland Foundation (ECN) has been established to coordinate the development of a national cord blood bank for unrelated transplants. The aim of ECN is to collect at least 5000 transplants for patients who lack an HLA-identical related or unrelated bone marrow donor. Four blood banks in Leiden, Groningen, Nijmegen and Amsterdam, Europdonor Foundation and the Department of Hematology of the Leiden University Medical Center participate in this organization. From March 1995 to November 1997, 720 units have been collected, processed, HLA typed, tested for transmissible diseases and cryopreserved in the Dutch cord blood bank.
Hematology analyzers are essential diagnostic and monitoring tools for detecting blood diseases. Although contemporary analyzers produce only basic insights, they are often not as detailed as required under the personalized medicine paradigm. Next-Generation Hematology Analyzers (NGHAs) are revolutionary newcomers in the field, with significant advantages over regular hematology analyzers. They provide deeper insights into cellular morphology, function, and genetic profiles. This detailed information opens up possibilities for tailor-made diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in precision medicine. This review presents some revolutionary technologies that have changed hematology analyzers and provides an overview of their limitations, basic functions, and influence on clinical practice. It focuses on the integration of state-of-the-art technologies, such as microfluidics, advanced optics, artificial intelligence, flow cytometry, and digital imaging, empowering NGHAs to improve diagnostic accuracy, rapidly detect diseases, and support flexible, targeted therapy. Hints regarding point-of-care hematology testing are also provided to discuss its implications for transforming healthcare
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising capabilities in medical image analysis by jointly understanding visual and textual information for tasks such as Visual Question Answering. However, existing hematology vision-language resources remain predominantly English centric, limiting their applicability in multilingual healthcare environments. This challenge is releveant generally to South Asia and specifically to Pakistan, where Urdu is widely used despite healthcare information and digital medical systems being largely dependent on English. To investigate this gap, we conducted a survey among healthcare professionals, which revealed substantial language mismatches between clinical documentation and patient communication, emphasizing the need for multilingual healthcare technologies. To address this limitation, we introduce WBCMor VQA, a clinically validated bilingual English, Urdu morphology aware VQA benchmark for leukemia and normal white blood cell analysis. The benchmark is constructed using morphology-aware annotations from LeukemiaAttri and WBCAtt datasets and supported by a domain specific Urdu hematology dictionary to ensure linguistic consistency and clinical cor
Traditional health authority approval for oncology drugs is based on a clinical benefit endpoint, or a valid surrogate. In 1992 the FDA created the Accelerated Approval pathway to allow for earlier approval of therapies in serious conditions with an unmet medical need. This is accomplished typically by granting accelerated approval based on a surrogate endpoint that can be measured earlier than a traditional approval endpoint. Minimal residual disease (MRD) is a sensitive measure of residual cancer cells in hematology oncology after treatment, and is increasingly considered as a secondary or exploratory endpoint due to its prognostic potential for traditional clinical trial endpoints such as progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). This work aims to evaluate MRD's surrogacy potential across several hematologic cancer indications while keeping the focus on follicular lymphoma (FL), using data from published studies. We examine individual-level and trial-level correlations extracted from previously published studies to elucidate the potential role of MRD in accelerating the drug approval process in hematology oncology trials.
In hematology, computational models offer significant potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, streamline workflows, and reduce the tedious work of analyzing single cells in peripheral blood or bone marrow smears. However, clinical adoption of computational models has been hampered by the lack of generalization due to large batch effects, small dataset sizes, and poor performance in transfer learning from natural images. To address these challenges, we introduce DinoBloom, the first foundation model for single cell images in hematology, utilizing a tailored DINOv2 pipeline. Our model is built upon an extensive collection of 13 diverse, publicly available datasets of peripheral blood and bone marrow smears, the most substantial open-source cohort in hematology so far, comprising over 380,000 white blood cell images. To assess its generalization capability, we evaluate it on an external dataset with a challenging domain shift. We show that our model outperforms existing medical and non-medical vision models in (i) linear probing and k-nearest neighbor evaluations for cell-type classification on blood and bone marrow smears and (ii) weakly supervised multiple instance learning for ac
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerged as a promising tool for mechanistic interpretability of transformer-based foundation models. Very recently, SAEs were also adopted for the visual domain, enabling the discovery of visual concepts and their patch-wise attribution to tokens in the transformer model. While a growing number of foundation models emerged for medical imaging, tools for explaining their inferences are still lacking. In this work, we show the applicability of SAEs for hematology. We propose CytoSAE, a sparse autoencoder which is trained on over 40,000 peripheral blood single-cell images. CytoSAE generalizes to diverse and out-of-domain datasets, including bone marrow cytology, where it identifies morphologically relevant concepts which we validated with medical experts. Furthermore, we demonstrate scenarios in which CytoSAE can generate patient-specific and disease-specific concepts, enabling the detection of pathognomonic cells and localized cellular abnormalities at the patch level. We quantified the effect of concepts on a patient-level AML subtype classification task and show that CytoSAE concepts reach performance comparable to the state-of-the-art, while offering exp
In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands quickly adopted the time ball -- a British innovation for maritime chronometer calibration -- in its main naval ports (Nieuwediep/Den Helder, Vlissingen, Hellevoetsluis) and commercial centres (Amsterdam, Rotterdam). A large sphere dropped from a mast at a fixed time, the device enabled ships to verify their chronometers against a standard, essential for accurate longitude determination and safe navigation. Its ready acceptance was eased by indigenous Dutch traditions. Rural communities had long used visual time signals like the sjouw on Terschelling island, a wicker ball raised on a mast to mark the lunch hour and milking time for farmers, and the lawei, a basket or sack used in the peat bogs of Friesland to regulate labourers' hours. The Dutch time-signal system was distinguished by its strong institutional backing from the country's Royal Navy, its Hydrographic Service and by professional astronomers. Among the latter, Frederik Kaiser was a pivotal figure, vehemently defending the system's accuracy and pioneering technical improvements. He successfully advocated for replacing the traditional falling ball with a system of rotating flaps,
Multimodal alignment of histopathology encoders with transcriptomic and genomic data has been shown to significantly improve performance in downstream diagnostic tasks. Hematological cytology is unique in that visual single-cell evaluation is often paired with cytogenetics and molecular genetics for blood cancer diagnosis. In this study, we present a framework to align single white blood cell images with chromosomal aberrations (karyotype) and somatic mutations from targeted gene panels. Our training strategy follows a two-stage approach: (i) self-supervised, vision-only pretraining of a transformer aggregator using an iBOT head on a cohort of over 1500 patients, and (ii) genetic alignment via supervised contrastive loss on acute myeloid leukemia patients. Our genetically aligned patient encoder improves hematological diagnostic tasks, outperforming slide-level histopathology foundation models. Additionally, the model provides off-the-shelf retrieval capabilities for diseases and genetic alterations. Incorporating genetic data into patient encoders increases the quality of patient representations, providing a framework that aligns with clinical diagnostic workflows and paves the wa
Scientific workflows have become essential for orchestrating complex computational processes across distributed resources, managing large datasets, and ensuring reproducibility in modern research. The Workflows Community Summit 2025, held in Amsterdam on June 6th, 2025, convened international experts to examine emerging challenges and opportunities in this domain. Participants identified key barriers to workflow adoption, including tensions between system generality and domain-specific utility, concerns over long-term sustainability of workflow systems and services, insufficient recognition for those who develop and maintain reproducible workflows, and gaps in standardization, funding, training, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. To address these challenges, the summit proposed action lines spanning technology, policy, and community dimensions: shifting evaluation metrics from raw computational performance toward measuring genuine scientific impact; formalizing workflow patterns and community-driven benchmarks to improve transparency, reproducibility, and usability; cultivating a cohesive international workflows community that engages funding bodies and research stakeholders; an
We develop a foundation model using 1.2m high resolution satellite images of the Netherlands. By combining a Convolutional Neural Network and a Vision Transformer, the model captures both low- and high-frequency landscape features, such as fine textures, edges, and small objects as well as large terrain structures, elevation patterns, and land-cover distributions. Leveraging temporal data as input, the model learns from broader contextual information across time, allowing the model to exploit the temporal dependencies, such as topographic features, land-cover changes, and seasonal dynamics. These additional constraints reduce feature ambiguity, improve representation learning, and enable better generalization with fewer labeled samples. The foundation model is evaluated on multiple downstream tasks, ranging from use cases within the Netherlands to global benchmarking datasets. On the vegetation monitoring dataset of the Netherlands, the model shows clear performance improvements by incorporating temporal information instead of relying on a single time point. Despite using a smaller model and less pretraining data limited to the Netherlands, it achieves competitive results on global
Peripheral blood smears remain a cornerstone in the diagnosis of hematological neoplasms, offering rapid and valuable insights that inform subsequent diagnostic steps. However, since neoplastic transformations typically arise in the bone marrow, they may not manifest as detectable aberrations in peripheral blood, presenting a diagnostic challenge. In this paper, we introduce cAItomorph, an explainable transformer-based AI model, trained to classify hematological malignancies based on peripheral blood cytomorphology. Our data comprises peripheral blood single-cell images from 6115 patients with diagnoses confirmed by cytomorphology, cytogenetics, molecular genetics, and immunophenotyping from bone marrow samples, and 495 healthy controls, eight coarse classes. cAItomorph leverages the DinoBloom hematology foundation model and aggregates image encodings via a transformer-based architecture into a single vector. It achieves an overall accuracy of 0.72 in eight disease classification, with F1 scores of 0.76 for acute leukemia, 0.80 for myeloproliferative neoplasms and 0.94 for healthy cases. The overall accuracy increases to 0.87 in top-2 predictions. cAItomorph achieves high sensitivi
Software has the potential to improve lives. Yet, unethical and uninformed software practices are at the root of an increasing number of ethical concerns. Despite its pervasiveness, few research has analyzed end-users perspectives on the ethical issues of the software they use. We address this gap, and investigate end-user's ethical concerns in software through 19 semi-structured interviews with residents of the Netherlands. We ask a diverse group of users about their ethical concerns when using everyday software applications. We investigate the underlying reasons for their concerns and what solutions they propose to eliminate them. We find that our participants actively worry about privacy, transparency, manipulation, safety and inappropriate content; with privacy and manipulation often being at the center of their worries. Our participants demand software solutions to improve information clarity in applications and provide more control over the user experience. They further expect larger systematic changes within software practices and government regulation.
FPGAs have transformed digital design by enabling versatile and customizable solutions that balance performance and power efficiency, yielding them essential for today's diverse computing challenges. Research in the Netherlands, both in academia and industry, plays a major role in developing new innovative FPGA solutions. This survey presents the current landscape of FPGA innovation research in the Netherlands by delving into ongoing projects, advancements, and breakthroughs in the field. Focusing on recent research outcome (within the past 5 years), we have identified five key research areas: a) FPGA architecture, b) FPGA robustness, c) data center infrastructure and high-performance computing, d) programming models and tools, and e) applications. This survey provides in-depth insights beyond a mere snapshot of the current innovation research landscape by highlighting future research directions within each key area; these insights can serve as a foundational resource to inform potential national-level investments in FPGA technology.
Since the Google Spain judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Europeans have, under certain conditions, the right to have search results for their name delisted. This paper examines how the Google Spain judgment has been applied in the Netherlands. Since the Google Spain judgment, Dutch courts have decided on two cases regarding delisting requests. In both cases, the Dutch courts considered freedom of expression aspects of delisting more thoroughly than the Court of Justice. However, the effect of the Google Spain judgment on freedom of expression is difficult to assess, as search engine operators decide about most delisting requests without disclosing much about their decisions.
This paper employs agent-based modelling to explore the factors driving the high rate of tertiary education completion in the Netherlands. We examine the interplay of economic motivations, such as expected wages and financial constraints, alongside sociological and psychological influences, including peer effects, student disposition, personality, and geographic accessibility. Through simulations, we analyse the sustainability of these trends and evaluate the impact of educational policies, such as student grants and loans, on enrollment and borrowing behaviour among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, further considering implications for the Dutch labour market.
Leukocyte differential test is a widely performed clinical procedure for screening infectious diseases. Existing hematology analyzers require labor-intensive work and a panel of expensive reagents. Here we report an artificial-intelligence enabled reagent-free imaging hematology analyzer (AIRFIHA) modality that can accurately classify subpopulations of leukocytes with minimal sample preparation. AIRFIHA is realized through training a two-step residual neural network using label-free images of separated leukocytes acquired from a custom-built quantitative phase microscope. We validated the performance of AIRFIHA in randomly selected test set and cross-validated it across all blood donors. AIRFIHA outperforms current methods in classification accuracy, especially in B and T lymphocytes, while preserving the natural state of cells. It also shows a promising potential in differentiating CD4 and CD8 cells. Owing to its easy operation, low cost, and strong discerning capability of complex leukocyte subpopulations, we envision AIRFIHA is clinically translatable and can also be deployed in resource-limited settings, e.g., during pandemic situations for the rapid screening of infectious dis
In the realm of hematologic cell populations classification, the intricate patterns within flow cytometry data necessitate advanced analytical tools. This paper presents 'HemaGraph', a novel framework based on Graph Attention Networks (GATs) for single-cell multi-class classification of hematological cells from flow cytometry data. Harnessing the power of GATs, our method captures subtle cell relationships, offering highly accurate patient profiling. Based on evaluation of data from 30 patients, HemaGraph demonstrates classification performance across five different cell classes, outperforming traditional methodologies and state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the uniqueness of this framework lies in the training and testing phase of HemaGraph, where it has been applied for extremely large graphs, containing up to hundreds of thousands of nodes and two million edges, to detect low frequency cell populations (e.g. 0.01% for one population), with accuracies reaching 98%. Our findings underscore the potential of HemaGraph in improving hematoligic multi-class classification, paving the way for patient-personalized interventions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to u
In our research we test data and models for the recognition of housing quality in the city of Amsterdam from ground-level and aerial imagery. For ground-level images we compare Google StreetView (GSV) to Flickr images. Our results show that GSV predicts the most accurate building quality scores, approximately 30% better than using only aerial images. However, we find that through careful filtering and by using the right pre-trained model, Flickr image features combined with aerial image features are able to halve the performance gap to GSV features from 30% to 15%. Our results indicate that there are viable alternatives to GSV for liveability factor prediction, which is encouraging as GSV images are more difficult to acquire and not always available.
A field experiment was conducted in Zuidbroek, the Netherlands to compare the performance of a DAS and horizontal-geophone system for shear-wave (SV) reflection surveying. The data were subjected to processing for reflection imaging, including conversion of the geophone data to strain-rate data, to enable such a comparison on migrated-section level. Our findings indicate that DAS straight-fibre data shows a lower-frequency information content, but achieves better reflector continuity than the geophone data due to the more continuous and denser sampling with the DAS system.
Using data from 35 Participatory Budgeting instances in Amsterdam, we empirically compare two different Participatory Budgeting rules: the greedy cost welfare rule and the Method of Equal Shares. We quantify how proportional, equal and fair the rules are and conclude that, for a small price in total voter satisfaction, the Method of Equal Shares performs better on all notions of fairness studied. We further provide a popular and a visual explanation of the Method of Equal Shares.