Giulia Saccomano receives the “Ingenio al Femminile” award for best PhD thesis

Giulia Saccomano, an engineering graduate of the University of Trieste, has received the award for the best PhD thesis within the framework of the “Ingenio al Femminile” call, a prestigious recognition promoted annually by the National Council of Engineers to highlight female talent and professional excellence in the field of engineering.

Saccomano carried out her PhD research at Elettra’s SYRMEP beamline, supported by a scholarship funded by Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, under the supervision of Diego Dreossi. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “From pixels to diagnosis: applications of X-ray Virtual Histology (XVH) in clinical pathology”, highlights a research project that exploits the SYRMEP beamline at Elettra to develop non-destructive three-dimensional X-ray Virtual Histology techniques. Integration with advanced deep learning algorithms makes it possible to overcome the limitations of traditional histopathology, improving the identification of clinically relevant structures and tumour margins.

The research project, promoted together with Prof. Giuliana Tromba, developed thanks to a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration involving the Department of Engineering of the University of Trieste, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, the Department of Radiology and the Department of Pathology of the Trieste Hospital, as well as the Computational Pathology Group of Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen (The Netherlands).