CAREER: Development of Enhanced Early Photon Tomography for Cancer Staging

Illinois Institute Of Technology, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Tichauer; 1653627 Approximately 1 in 8 women in the US will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. Over 40,000 women are projected to die from the disease in 2016. Surgical resection and pathology of tumor-draining lymph nodes is the current standard for detecting whether cancer has spread. However, because of the time-consuming nature of pathological assessment, less than 1% of a typical excised node is surveyed and microscopic levels of cancer are liable to be missed. The objective of this work is to rapidly map cancer distribution in surgically excised "tumor-draining" or "sentinel" lymph nodes using a novel optical imaging technology that could guide sectioning of lymph nodes in pathology so that even microscopic levels of cancer are not missed. The approach, named ADEPT (Agent Dependent Early Photon Tomography), combines two methods that serve to provide high sensitivity and selectivity for cancer cells within highly scattering media. First, an infrared-emitting dye perfuse the node, with one dye selectively targeted to cancer cells, while the other is nonspecific, enabling compensation for local variability in dye concentration. Second, pulse excitation combined with snapshot detection of the earliest photons-to-arrive-at-the detector are counted. To obtain 3-D reconstructions of the internal lymph node volume, the image plane is scanned through the volume. With the appropriate selection of dyes, the approach can be applied to thick tissue (up to 1 cm), with a goal of 100 um image resolution.