Colin Morehouse Carpenter1,2, Shudong Jiang2,
Steven P. Poplack3, Roberta M. diFlorio-Alexander3,
Brian William Pogue2, Keith David Paulsen2
1Radiation Oncology, Stanford
University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, United States; 2Thayer
School of Engineering at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, United States; 3Radiology,
Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, NH, United States
Breast
MR has high sensitivity, yet suffers from comparatively low specificity. Optical imaging may aid MR mammography by
providing spatial maps of disease-specific tissue properties such as total
hemoglobin, oxygen saturation, water content, and tissue microstructure
scatter, which have been shown in several studies to offer high specificity
to malignant cancer. A multimodality
MR-guided optical breast imaging instrument (MRg-OBI) has been developed and
validated through numerous phantom and healthy volunteer studies. This study examined the ability of MRg-OBI
in characterizing malignant from benign lesions in five patients. The results
show that total hemoglobin is a good indicator of malignancy, with tumor to
background contrast varying greatly from 1.25 up to 8.0, compared to less
than 1 for the benign/fully responded lesions.
Keywords