medresearch: New Imaging Technique Aims to Ensure Surgeons...

[Health and Medicine]

medresearch:

New Imaging Technique Aims to Ensure Surgeons Completely Remove Cancer     

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, along with collaborators at the California Institute of Technology, have developed photoacoustic imaging, a new method to scan a tumor sample and produce images detailed and accurate enough to be used to check whether a tumor has been completely removed. This could replace the current method of determining whether or not all cancerous tissue has been removed, which takes a day or more. More work is needed before photoacoustic imaging is fast enough to be used during an operation.

The research is published in Science Advances.

“This is a proof of concept that we can use photoacoustic imaging on breast tissue and get images that look similar to traditional staining methods without any sort of tissue processing,” said Deborah Novack, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine, and of pathology and immunology, and a co-senior author on the study.

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Funding: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grant number DP1 EB016986 and R01 CA186567, and by Washington University’s Siteman Cancer Center’s 2014 Research Development Award.

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Via