Needle photoacoustic probe system for cancer diagnosis

Needle biopsy followed by histopathology analysis has been the gold standard method for cancer diagnosis in clinic. This method not only is invasive but also has limitations such as small sampling volume and slow process. Laser-induced ultrasonic imaging and sensing, namely photoacoustic (PA) technology, is an emerging tool holding great promise for many clinical applications including cancer diagnosis. Recently, our team at the University of Michigan developed a needle based photoacoustic device which, when guided by ultrasound, could enable in vivo characterization of pathologic conditions. When inserted into a target tissue, the needle photoacoustic probe can evaluation both chemical properties and histological microstructures in the tissue. Being able to facilitate fast diagnosis of pathological conditions in situ, such a needle probe could help to guide biopsy sampling to achieve significantly improved accuracy.

The central hypothesis of this study is that a needle based PA probe can guide cancer biopsy and improve the core yield and decrease false negative rates. This proposed research will leverage the long-term experience in Prof. Jay Guo’s lab in microfabrication of opto-acoustic devices and the track record of Prof. Xueding Wang and Guan Xu’s group in developing photoacoustic imaging and sensing technologies. Our needle PA probe has a unique all-optical design that allows a small probe dimension without causing additional invasiveness to the biopsy procedure. In this research, the performance and limitations of our PA needle probe will be evaluated via the experiments on prostate cancer and breast cancer tissues from the clinic, preparing for major grants and paving the road toward large-scale clinical studies.

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Project ID: 1030