Improved diagnostic tool is result of medical, engineering
collaboration
Dartmouth physicians and engineers are collaborating to test new imaging
techniques to find breast abnormalities, including cancer. Results from their
latest study, which involved magnetic resonance-guided, near-infrared imaging,
appear in the May 22 issue of the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"This paper is the culmination of five years of work to build a completely
new type of imaging system, which integrates magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
and near-infrared imaging (NIR)," says Brian
Pogue, associate professor of engineering and one of
the authors of the study.
From left: Brian Pogue, associate professor of engineering (left) and study
coauthors Subhadra Srinivasan, Thayer School research associate, and John
Weaver, professor of radiology at Dartmouth Medical School.
|
He explains that because infrared light is sensitive to blood, researchers
can locate and quantify regions of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin by
sending infrared light through breast tissue with a fiber optic array. This
might help detect early tumor growth and characterize the stage of a tumor by
learning about its vascular and cellular makeup.
"The new integrated system allows us to quantify the hemoglobin, water,
and scattering values of the tissues with NIR, while using the high resolution
of MRI," says Pogue. "For breast imaging, this new system means that
we will be able to enhance the information that MRI provides by allowing us to
image breast tumors with a completely different mechanism of contrast, namely
hemoglobin, oxygen saturation, water, and optical scattering."
Pogue is part of an interdisciplinary team that includes researchers from Thayer School of
Engineering and Dartmouth Medical
School (DMS), working with experts at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and the
Department of Radiology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC). The
group is developing and testing imaging techniques to learn about breast tissue
structure and behavior.
The study of 11 healthy women offers baseline data of this new technique.
The system was developed in lab space at DHMC through shared research with DMS.
According to Pogue, this approach to long-range technology development and
collaboration is unique, and Thayer and DMS have a special relationship that
allows this to happen easily. Shared lab space and shared indirect costs allow
close collaborations between engineering researchers and medical doctors.
Pogue's coauthors include Ben Brooksby, Shudong Jiang, Hamid Dehghani,
Subhadra Srinivasan, Christine Kogel, Tor Tosteson, John Weaver, Steven
Poplack, and Keith Paulson, all associated with Thayer, DMS, or DHMC. Support
for this study came from the National Cancer
Institute (NCI), and recent continuing support has come through an NCI
Program Project grant directed by Professor of Engineering Keith Paulsen.
By SUSAN KNAPP
|
RSS/XML Feed