The maturation of diffuse optical techniques to reveal the functional states of deep tissues emphasizes the potential of this technique as a new medical modality especially in the field of breast cancer detection. Although exciting and promising, the necessity of angiogenesis-mediated absorption contrast for diagnostic optical mammography minimizes the potential for using NIR techniques. Using of exogeneous contrast agent has been shown to augment the endogeneous contrast. Due to FDA regulation, the contrast agent used is Indocyanine Green (ICG). While this contrast agent has been demonstrated to be useful for breast cancer detection and characterization, the investigation were limited to 'snapshot' of uptake. The local pharmacokinetics of this compound are expected to provide additional cancer features such has seen in other modalities like Ultrasound or MRI, enhancing the diagnostic potential of optical mammography. However, to perform such task, a fast optical imager is much needed. New design employing new technological development will allow to build a system gathering data from 32 sources and 24 detectors in the 2 second acquisition time range. Such short time of acquisition for such a large data-set will allow to retrieve the local pharmacokinetics constant of ICG. Moreover, to cross-validate the technique with gold-standard the system will be coupled to a Magnetic Resonance Imager (MRI). This coregistartion will allow to establish the sensitivity-specificity of the optical technique whereas it will allow also to benefit from the a priori information derived from MRI. Such a priori information implemented in the inverse problem of DOT garantees fast and accurate optical images. The scope of this grant falls in the scope of the NTROI (headed by Bruce Tromberg, UC-I) harwdware core. Dr. Chance who presides the hardware comitte of the NTROI and has vast expertise in the field of optical imaging, and ART which has a solid expertise in molecular optical imaging and optical mamography will join their efforts to provide a new and unique system to improve the sensitivity and specificity of optical technique for breast cancer detetection and characterization.
| Alacam, Burak; Yazici, Birsen; Intes, Xavier et al. (2006) Extended kalman filtering for the modeling and analysis of ICG pharmacokinetics in cancerous tumors using NIR optical methods. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 53:1861-71 |
| Guven, Murat; Yazici, Birsen; Intes, Xavier et al. (2005) Diffuse optical tomography with a priori anatomical information. Phys Med Biol 50:2837-58 |
| Intes, Xavier; Chance, Britton (2005) Non-PET functional imaging techniques: optical. Radiol Clin North Am 43:221-34, xii |
