Dr Ferdinand van der Heijden, (M) Associate Professor, obtained his MSc (1981) and PhD (1992) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Twente. He is currently affiliated with the Robotics and Mechatronics group working on medical applications. He conducts his research work at the MIRA Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine. Since 2014, he has also been associated with the Netherlands Cancer Institute / Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital. His research interests are in the area of image and video analysis. The work involves specific applications in surgical navigation, medical image analysis and modelling. He is the author of two widely-used textbooks, “Image Based Measurement Systems” and “Classification, Parameter Estimation and State Estimation” (2nd edition published in 2017).