Current and future trends in photoacoustic breast imaging

Abstract

Non-invasive detection of breast cancer has been regarded as the holy grail of applications for photoacoustic (optoacoustic) imaging right from the early days of re-discovery of the method. Two-and-a-half decades later we report on the state-of-the-art in photoacoustic breast imaging technology and clinical studies. Even within the single application of breast imaging, we find imagers with various measurement geometries, ultrasound detection characteristics, illumination schemes, and image reconstruction strategies. We first analyze the implications on performance of a few of these design choices in a generic imaging system, before going into detailed descriptions of the imagers. Per imaging system we present highlights of patient studies, which barring a couple are mostly in the nature of technology demonstrations and proof-of-principle studies. We close this work with a discussion on several aspects that may turn out to be crucial for the future clinical translation of the method.

Opto-acoustic imaging of relative blood oxygen saturation and total hemoglobin for breast cancer diagnosis

“…In addition, several review papers for OA breast imaging have compared the visualization approaches of various imaging devices, along with the corresponding tumors features that were clinically detected. [1][2][3][4][5]12,19,20,43 5. 71 describes implementation and the associated challenges with these approaches in detail.…”

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] For breast cancer diagnosis, one promising technique is OA imaging combined with ultrasound (OA/US). [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] Combining OA with ultrasound is advantageous because each modality provides information that is complementary to the other. Structural and functional information pertaining to total hemoglobin concentration (c tHb ) and blood oxygen saturation (s O 2 ) can be visualized with OA, while morphological and anatomical information can be obtained with ultrasound.…”

“…[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]42,43 To date, the largest clinical effort surrounds the Imagio ® breast imaging system (Seno Medical Instruments, Inc., San Antonio, Texas), a 2-D system which has evaluated breast lesions in over 2000 subjects. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]19 The system displays qualitative OA/US maps to visualize areas of strong relative s O 2 and c tHb using a statistical color mapping technique. 44 The OA/US image maps from a malignant lesion are shown in Fig.…”

Photoacoustic Imaging for Management of Breast Cancer: A Literature Review and Future Perspectives

“…Steinberg et al [34], presented various clinical studies performed using PA imaging. In some recent review articles [52,53], the state of the art PA imaging systems, as well as the clinical studies for breast cancer diagnosis using PA imaging, were reported.…”

“…This gives the readers a complete picture of the development of PA imaging systems for breast cancer management. The recent review articles [48,52] only focused on clinical PA imaging studies which did not include phantom studies, animal studies using endogenous and exogenous contrast agents (dyes and nanoparticles) for breast cancer detection as well as SLN detection, ex vivo studies with human breast tissue samples.…”