Purdue University
2015 BMEidea First Prize Winner
stage 2 E-Team grant winner, $25,000
The team members:
Dr. Ji-Xin Cheng, Professor
Rui Li, PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Lu Lan, PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Collaborators:
Dr. Pu Wang, Vibronix, Inc.
Frank P. Lloyd Jr., MD, Putman County Hospital, Indiana
Dr. Shaoxiong Chen, Indiana University School of Medicine
Dr. Craig J. Goergen, Purdue University
Linda K. Han, MD, Indiana University Health
Summary of problem & solution:
Breast-conserving surgery, or lumpectomy, is well accepted for breast cancer treatment. To prevent local cancer recurrence after lumpectomy, histology (tissue study) is performed to check whether the excised tumor specimen is surrounded by a sufficient amount of normal tissue. If a positive margin, i.e., less than 2 mm between the surfaces of the excised specimen to the tumor, is identified, then a second operation will be performed. Currently, the reoperation rate is 20~70%. This results in several problems: additional cost for the second or even third surgical operation, and emotional distress and physical pain for the patients, which highlights a critical need for rapid and highly sensitive intraoperative margin assessment. Our MarginPAT system is an intraoperative imaging tool based on multispectral photoacoustic tomography, which uniquely provides contrast of tumor and non-tumor tissue based on the difference between their optical absorption properties. Our technology can provide close to 100% detection sensitivity, three-dimensional visualization of the excised tissue, and only take less than 2 minutes procedure time, the fastest intraoperative margin assessment tool so far to our knowledge. Therefore, MarginPAT enables 1) surgeon to clear the cancer residue during the first operation, thus reducing the re-operation rate to 0%; 2) decrease the average cost of lumpectomy by close to 30%.