Mark Anastasio and team receive close to $2.2 million NIH award for advanced ultrasound research

11/13/2019 Mike Koon

With a new NIH R01 award, Mark Anastasio and team are developing more advanced, higher-resolution ultrasound technology for improved mammography that is aimed at earlier, better detection of breast cancer

Written by Mike Koon

Mammography is the current state-of-the-art method for detecting and diagnosing breast cancer. However, even a mammogram doesn’t detect certain subtle breast cancers, especially those in younger women who typically have denser breast tissue. In the growing need to improve imaging techniques, the National Institutes of Health has awarded an RO1 grant titled, “Advanced image reconstruction for accurate and high-resolution breast ultrasound tomography,” to teams at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Wayne State University.

Mark Anastasio, Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering and the head of the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois, is the contact principal investigator on the project and is teaming with co-PI Neb Duric, an internationally acclaimed leader in ultrasound imaging research from Wayne State. Duric is also the chief technology officer of Delphinus Medical Technologies, which is commercializing his ultrasound tomography techniques.

“The current methods of mammography or tomosynthesis are based on X-rays,” Anastasio noted. “Some small early-stage cancers, especially in younger women, are difficult to detect in such images, so the industry understands the need for improvement. We’re investigating this new technology that can be useful for breast cancer imaging that is based on the use of ultrasound instead of X-rays. Not only is it safer because it doesn’t involve ionizing radiation, it is more sensitive to certain tissue properties that will make it easier to detect subtle breast cancers.”

Ultrasound tomography utilizes ultrasound waves to interrogate an object and tomographic principles for image formation. It is mostly employed to image soft tissues in medical imaging applications, especially breast imaging. Similar to X-ray CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound tomography requires use of a reconstruction method to compute an image that depicts the internal structure of the object. Image reconstruction and computational image science is the core expertise of Anastasio and his lab team.

While Duric’s team has pioneered the ultrasound tomography method, better clarity of the final images is desired. Through the RO1 grant, Anastasio’s team will try to improve the quality of the images. To do that, they will develop physics-based computational models and advanced image reconstruction methods. High-performance computing methods also will be required.

“We quickly realized that, through the use of advanced image reconstruction principles and high-performance computing, we can actually do a better job of modeling the physics and reconstruct images of much better quality,” Anastasio explained. “They almost look like MRI images, in terms of resolution.”

Both Duric and Anastasio chose to focus this technique on breast cancer detection, partly because it is a disease the affects a vast number of women but also because it is a part of the body where ultrasound tomography will work relatively well.

“If you wanted to image a thicker part of the body, say the abdomen, it would be tougher because the ultrasound would be more attenuated and more scattered,” Anastasio said.

Over the course of the four-year grant, Anastasio’s team plans to model the interaction of ultrasound energy with the breast tissue, as well as the response of the imaging system. They’ll characterize the model in a computational tractable way then invert to form the image. They’ll use those computations to develop an algorithm and work with Duric’s team on the experimental side. Once they are able to form accurate images, the final piece will be to work with radiologists to refine the reconstruction methods to maximize the clinical utility of the produced images.

“In the end, we hope to have a fully optimized and validated image construction algorithm where we can reconstruct 3D images of the breast that can be subsequently evaluated in large-scale clinical trials and turned into a useful product,” Anastasio concluded.

Once successful, the method could profoundly improve the early detection of cancerous tumors, especially in young women. In addition to improved screening capabilities, it also could be used for evaluating risks for developing cancer -- such as detecting biomarkers -- which could lead to personalized screening methodologies. And it could be used as an aid in evaluation to determine how a patient is responding to a given therapy.


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This story was published November 13, 2019.