Full-Ring Ultrasound and Enhanced Photoacoustic Tomography System: Toward Multimodal, Nonionizing, and Point-of-Care Breast Cancer Imaging
Abstract
Lack of a highly sensitive and specific clinical tool for differential diagnosis of breast cancer has led to a large number of benign biopsies, resulting in unnecessary physical and emotional distress for patients and a substantial national financial health care burden for overdiagnosed or overtreated breast cancer. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a non-ionizing, non-invasive, operator-independent and cost-efficient diagnostic tool that enables enhanced screening and diagnosis of breast cancer by providing morphological, mechanical, functional, and molecular information of the pathologic tissue. The proposed technology can enhance the standard of care for both screening and differential diagnosis of breast cancer. Especially, patients with dense breast who are at particularly high risk for developing breast cancer will benefit from this technology since current standard of care (mammography) is limited due to low positive predictive value and sensitivity. Screening studies utilizing whole breast ultrasound have shown a significant increase in the detection of cancers of up to 4 additional cancers per 1,000 screens, thereby validating ultrasound’s known superior performance in dense tissue. However, ultrasound’s increased sensitivity to invasive cancer is offset by increased call back rates (i.e., low specificity). Improved lesion characterization would therefore help lower the barriers to adoption of screening ultrasound. Photoacoustic is an ideal complement to ultrasound since it shares a lot of common roots, including the signal and image acquisition. Combining ultrasound and photoacoustic provides a whole new range of diagnostic information such as blood vasculature density (angiogenesis) and tissue hypoxia, which are known biomarkers for early stage and differential diagnosis of breast lesions. In other words, combining ultrasound and photoacoustic tomography can lead to a radiation-free, comfortable, fast, widely available, point-of-care, multi-modal tomographic imaging system for accurate screening and diagnosis of breast cancer. In addition, “individualized medicine” is a revolutionary breakthrough in treating diseases such as cancer, which requires imaging biological events at cellular and molecular scale. While ultrasound by itself is not capable of imaging events at cellular and molecular level, photoacoustic, augmented with biocompatible, light-absorbing cellular and molecular contrast agents, is able to serve as a molecular imaging tool and thus enable individualized medicine for patients with breast cancer.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 29, 2018
- Source ID
- W81XWH1810039
Entities
People
- Mohammad MehrMohammadi
Organizations
- United States Army
- Wayne State University