Acoustic Angiography Has Potential to Be Fast, Inexpensive Cancer Diagnosis Tool

In the body, following the twists and turns of blood vessels is complicated, but important. Vessel “bendiness” can indicate the presence and progression of cancer. This tenet has led scientists to a new way of using a high-resolution ultrasound to identify early tumors in preclinical studies. The technology, based on vessel bendiness (tortuosity), has the potential to provide an inexpensive, noninvasive, and quick way to identify cancer that could someday help clinicians identify cancers when tumors are less than 1 cm in size.

The researchers, from University of North Carolina (UNC; Chapel Hill, USA), published their findings were published online July 6, 2012, in the journal Radiology. Paul Dayton, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering, explained, “The correlation between vessel tortuosity and cancer is well-established. What’s new about our finding is that we can visualize these vessels in minutes with a very quick scan, using very inexpensive imaging methods.”

The UNC team used a new high-resolution ultrasound method, called “acoustic angiography,” with an intravascular contrast agent that allowed them to acquire images of only the blood vessels. “Unlike current clinical grayscale ultrasound, this method filters out all tissue signals, so we can see small blood vessels clearly,” said Dr. Dayton. “Our results showed a definitive difference between vessels within and surrounding tumors versus those associated with normal healthy vasculature. The limitation that we must now address is that our method works only for tumors at a shallow depth into tissue, such as melanomas or thyroid cancer. Our next studies will focus on this imaging-depth issue as well as evaluating the ability of this technology to determine a tumor’s response to therapy.”

Dr. Dayton further reported that he and his colleagues knew from several clinical and preclinical MRI studies at UNC by Elizabeth Bullitt, MD, and others, and at other institutions that vessels can unbend, or “normalize,” in response to effective therapy. He stressed that clinicians need to see if this inexpensive ultrasound-based method of blood vessel visualization and tortuosity analysis can detect this normalization prior to traditional evaluations of tumor response to therapy, such as measurements of tumor size.

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