Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Imagine taking a picture of a tree from approximately 300 meters away. While one can maybe identify the tree in the resulting picture, it would be impossible to count the number of branches and measure how far apart from each other they are. The blood vessels within a cancerous tumour can be thought of as the branches of the tree and the photograph might be a medical imaging modality commonly used in hospitals. The goal of this work is to develop a means of counting the blood vessel branches within a tumour using photoacoustic (PA) imaging and measuring how far apart they are from each other. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, referred to his lesser known discovery of the PA effect as "the greatest invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone". This effect is based on the conversion of light energy to audible sound. It forms the basis of the PA imaging modality. Almost 140 years after its discovery, we are using the PA effect to study vascular networks in breast cancer tumours. Using a processing algorithm developed in our laboratory (called cepstrum), we can measure the spacing and repeating patterns occurring within the vasculature of tumours. Such analysis of PA images of tumour blood vessels can retrieve information about the growth of tumour vasculature at various stages of cancer development. By quantifying such changes in spatial organization, we hope to identify which tumours respond to cancer treatments. This work can potentially impact the design of effective cancer therapies which target the tumour vasculature. It can save invaluable health care resources which are often irreversibly lost during the administration of ineffective therapies. Most importantly, it has can affect and improve the lives of millions of Canadian women inflicted with various forms of breast cancers.