Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Women who have been diagnosed with large or aggressive breast cancers are advised to undergo treatment to shrink thetumour prior to surgery. Treatment usually involves cytotoxic intravenous chemotherapy. Not all women respond to the drugsequally. About 75% of women respond well to the drugs, and tumours are reduced in size so that surgery becomes anoption. In the remaining 25% of women, the drugs have little or no effect in which case mastectomy or palliation are the onlyremaining options. Recently, researchers have discovered that increased levels of oxygen-rich blood in and around breasttumours as early as one day after drug treatment are predictive of tumours that shrink. However, the imaging method usedby the researchers took a long time to perform and could not precisely locate the changes inside the breast. In our work, wewill use non-contact 3D photoacoustic/ultrasonic tomography to quickly and accurately image the distribution of oxygen-richblood inside the breast. We predict that non-contact 3D photoacoustic/ultrasonic tomography will provide a detailed view ofthe oxygen-rich blood inside and around tumours after a single dose of chemotherapy to identify women who respond well tothe drugs and those who do not. If the project is successful, then non-contact 3D photoacoustic/ultrasonic tomography couldbe used by doctors to predict chemotherapy sensitivity as soon as one day after treatment starts, not after several cycles ormonths, as is now the case. For women whose non-contact 3D photoacoustic/ultrasonic tomographic results predict thatthey will not respond to the current treatment, second line chemotherapy regimens or alternative treatment options such asradiation could be selected to shrink the tumours rather than allow them to continue to grow.