Photoacoustic Dual-scan Mammoscope Study Results Released
WILLIAMSVILLE – March 22, 2021 – Windsong’s Breast Center worked in collaboration with Dr. Jun Xia’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UB Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Science, as well as Roswell Cancer Institute, on an innovative breast imaging technology – Photoacoustic Dual-scan Mammoscope (DSM), which is shown to have promising potentials in breast cancer detection. This new imaging technology uses a combination of laser and ultrasound to image the breast. And the recent research data were published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics Express.
In the study, a total of 38 patients with various breast tumor were imaged and the results of tumor-bearing breast were compared with healthy breast for each patient. The photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging results were also compared with clinical ultrasound. Vascular features in and around the tumor mass were visualized. The tumor-bearing breast were found to contain vessels of larger caliber and exhibited stronger variations in the background signals than those in the contralateral healthy breasts with DSM. Preliminary data on photoacoustic and ultrasound images also indicate this technique has potential in differentiating tumor types. Overall, these results indicate that combining photoacoustic and ultrasound images have promising potential in breast cancer detection.
According to Dr. Cynthia Fan, breast imaging radiologist and research collaborator at Windsong, this new technology is non-invasive, radiation-free, requires only minimal compression, and more tolerable for patients. It holds great promise to improve breast cancer detection and tumor characterization. This research was initially generously funded by a grant from the Komen Foundation, and it has recently received a new $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to continue its work on developing the aforementioned portable DSM. The full study can be found at OSA | Photoacoustic dual-scan mammoscope: results from 38 patients (osapublishing.org).
