Abstract
Microvascular blood flow contrast is an important hemodynamic and metabolic parameter with potential to enhance in vivo breast cancer detection and therapy monitoring. Here we report on non-invasive line-scan measurements of malignant breast tumors with a hand-held optical probe in the remission geometry. The probe employs diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), a near-infrared optical method that quantifies deep tissue microvascular blood flow. Tumor-to-normal perfusion ratios are derived from thirty-two human subjects. Mean (95% confidence interval) tumor-to-normal ratio using surrounding normal tissue was 2.25 (1.92–2.63); tumor-to-normal ratio using normal tissues at the corresponding tumor location in the contralateral breast was 2.27 (1.94–2.66), and using normal tissue in the contralateral breast was 2.27 (1.90–2.70). Thus, the mean tumor-to-normal ratios were significantly different from unity irrespective of the normal tissue chosen, implying that tumors have significantly higher blood flow than normal tissues. Therefore, the study demonstrates existence of breast cancer contrast in blood flow measured by DCS. The new, optically accessible cancer contrast holds potential for cancer detection and therapy monitoring applications, and it is likely to be especially useful when combined with diffuse optical spectroscopy/tomography.
Highlights
Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide [1], and advances in early detection, accurate diagnosis, and prediction of therapeutic efficacy are important for improving the survival of those affected by the disease [2]
Breast cancer studies with Diffuse optical spectroscopy (DOS) and DOT have found endogenous total hemoglobin concentration to be higher in malignant tumors compared to surrounding healthy tissue and benign tumors [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]; further, varied reports exist for contrast in other functional optical parameters [3,4,24]
We report the ratio of diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS)-measured microvascular blood flow in the tumor-versus-normal tissues of 32 patients with malignant breast tumors
Summary
Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide [1], and advances in early detection, accurate diagnosis, and prediction of therapeutic efficacy are important for improving the survival of those affected by the disease [2]. To this end, development of new techniques which complement information provided by routine clinical imaging methods is desirable. Diffuse optical spectroscopy (DOS) and tomography (DOT) are relatively new non-invasive and low-cost techniques that provide unique functional information for breast cancer applications using near-infrared (NIR: 650–1000 nm) light sources [3]. DOS/DOT has exhibited sensitivity to changes induced by breast cancer therapies and has demonstrated potential to predict therapeutic efficacy [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44]
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