Grant: Operating Grant

The goal of this work is to develop a safe, non-invasive and inexpensive treatment monitoring tool for monitoring cancer treatments in both small animals (to be used as a research tool) and in patients. We have shown that ultrasound imaging can be used to distinguish between cancer cells that are responding to a treatment and cancer cells that do not. Our unique approach is to use the frequency dependence of the backscatter, as well as other characteristics of scattered sound not typically used in traditional ultrasound machines, to infer about the status of cells in a tumor, whether they are intact or dying. We have found in the past that since the structure of the cell and cancer tissue is what determines the backscatter signatures, one needs to focus on a specific tumor type to rigorously develop the method. Due to our expertise, ultrasound imaging considerations and clinical impact, we have chosen breast cancer as the target cancer. In this work, we propose to further develop the technique to bring it closer to clinical use and use new techniques to explore the various ways to increase the specificity and sensitivity of the technique to better help physicians understand the progression of the cancer treatment, both clinically and in experimental animal models. We will do experiments on breast cancer cell collections (emulating tumors in well controlled conditions) and implanted tumors in mice to validate the technique. The successful completion of this research could have a significant impact since the methods described in this work enable the collection of ultrasound data from tumors before and multiple times during treatments. This technique can be used to determine tumor responses early, within hours after the treatment start. Such an early indicator of response would enable an oncologist to tailor anticancer treatments to individual patients and could be promising in the monitoring of multistage interventions or combination treatments.