Dartmouth researchers are working on a project that may allow doctors to better determine whether a tumor is malignant or benign - without having to do a surgical biopsy. Members of the College's Near Infrared Imaging Group published an article earlier this week in the April issue of the Optics Letters journal discussing their research on a new breast cancer diagnosis technique.
The article details one of the first case studies in which the researchers were able to successfully use a combination of NIR optical imaging and Magnetic Resonance Imaging on a patient to detect molecules that are indicative of cancer.
Colin Carpenter, the leading graduate student involved in the project, explained the benefits of utilizing the two technologies in tandem.
"Coupling the MRI with the optical imaging gives you better quantitative answers and higher resolution," he said. "That's much more attractive for a physician to look at."
Carpenter said that better imaging could have a number of important effects on the world of breast imaging.
"A lot of times the MRI can see something that looks suspicious, but it really can't see if it's cancer or not," he said. "We can differentiate between malignant and benign."
The new technique could potentially cut down on the substantial number of false positives that appear in current MRIs, Carpenter said.
The work with optical imaging is part of a larger program to develop alternative breast cancer imaging modalities. The effort is led by Keith Paulsen, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering.
Paulsen explained that current MRIs use a contrast agent to highlight cancerous tumors, but that the process often highlights normal, non-cancerous breast abnormalities. Oftentimes these abnormalities are unknown, forcing physicians to perform biopsies to find more accurate results.
"If optical information were specific enough, you might be able to rule out a number of these false positives," Paulsen said.
Carpenter said that advancements in the field may eventually allow doctors to obtain information without surgical biopsies in certain situations.
"The real goal is to ultimately be able to put the optical imaging device on the [magnetic resonance machine] and you could do an optical biopsy," he said. "That would mean that you wouldn't have to do the surgery."
Carpenter added that there is still much more work to be done before this technology will be accurate enough to be put to use.
"It looks quite promising, but we need to accrue a little bit more experience with it," Paulsen said.
In the past few years the project has taken on a more clinical approach. Beginning in 2006, researchers started to image patients more frequently. Paulsen explained that MRIs are expensive and that the physicians and patients want to be able to gain as much information as they can from one image. Paulsen added that the optical device can be combined relatively inexpensively with existing MRI machines and would not be brand specific.
Carpenter said the commercial appeal lies in the symbiotic nature of the two technologies.
"The MR is helping the optical, because they're providing [optical researchers] with high resolution images that we can map our data onto," he said. "And we're helping the MR, because we're helping the MR's capability to determine if a tumor is malignant or benign."
