Integrated Platform for Spectroscopic Thermoacoustic Imaging and Focused Microwave Therapy of the Breast
Abstract
Breast Conservation Therapy: Breast cancer is the second most fatal disease among women. Standard treatments are aggressive and include removal of part or all of the breast, delivery of drugs with toxic side effects, and/or radiation exposure. Studies over the past 20 years demonstrate that less aggressive therapies for early-stage breast cancer benefit from superior cosmetic appearance, outcomes, and quality of life than aggressive treatments. There is also evidence that preserving as much healthy breast tissue as possible, while destroying the tumor, may help protect against the return or spread of breast cancer. For these reasons, there has been a progressive trend towards minimally invasive methods with less morbidity and better cosmetic appearance for treating breast cancer. However, despite the promise of conservative therapies, current protocols still require aggressive treatment. There is, therefore, an unmet need for less invasive strategies to treat localized breast cancers, while preserving as much healthy breast tissue as possible. Promise and Limitations of Thermal Therapies (Hyperthermia) for Breast Cancer: Compared to surgery and other aggressive treatment options, thermal therapies offer less scarring, better tissue preservation, superior cosmesis, faster recovery time, and lower healthcare cost. Despite the promise of hyperthermia for treatment of breast cancer, specific technological challenges remain, especially control of the temperature at the tumor site during treatment, while minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Moreover, most thermal therapies are either limited to small tumors (<2 cm) or have not yet demonstrated benefit for larger solid breast tumors. In short, there is a great need for an integrated system that combines thermal treatment for localized breast cancers with real-time imaging to monitor the heating zone and track temperature. Such feedback would help optimize treatment and could improve outcomes for localized breast cancers. Proposed Solution: To address this unmet need, we propose developing and testing focused microwave therapy (FMT) integrated with 3D spectroscopic thermoacoustic imaging (STI) and millimeter resolution for mapping water/fat content, tracking temperature, and monitoring the heating zone during treatment. Justification for Overarching Challenges: (1) Replace aggressive/life-threatening interventions with safe, effective interventions. STI-guided FMT could replace breast surgery as an effective breast conservation therapy for early-stage breast cancers and outperform other thermal therapies, which have not yet shown benefit for tumors >1.5 cm in clinical trials. For advanced stage localized breast cancer, the imaging and therapy platform would employ mild heating to enhance drug delivery and promote tumor shrinkage. This approach has improved the outcome for invasive breast cancers by reducing or eliminating possible residual tumor cells following surgery. (2) Improve prognosis and reduce chance of recurrence by preserving healthy tissue and retaining natural killer cells (e.g., cytotoxic lymphocytes). There is evidence that thermal therapies, as opposed to surgery, stimulate an antitumor immune response that could reduce the chance of recurrence and/or distant metastasis. Objectives: This project has three specific aims that will focus on (A) designing and building broadband, image-guided FMT system that is noninvasive, safe, and effective for treating small or large solid breast tumors as a possible replacement or complement to invasive surgery (Aims 1 and 2) and (b) benchmarking performance and optimizing STI-guided FMT platform using numerical breast phantoms, animal tissue, and pilot study in human cadaver breasts (Aim 3). We will use the following performance metrics during the three aims for evaluating the adaptive image-guided platform: accuracy/precision for estimating water and fat content, temperature, and size, loc
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 31, 2017
- Source ID
- W81XWH1610423
Entities
People
- Russell S Witte
Organizations
- United States Army
- University of Arizona