Ultrasonic (US) imager for enhanced resolution, contrast and fast patient screening via co-registration with photoacoustic-radar tomographic (PART) imaging of breast cancer

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A biomedical ultrasonic (US) imager is requested as an accessory to, and for integration and co-registration (or co-imaging) with, a unique photoacoustic-radar tomography (PART) imager developed in our laboratory. The PART imager operates in the frequency domain, it uses current-modulated semiconductor laser sources and a transducer phased array with detection based on radar (or sonar) principles. PART software produces simultaneous amplitude and phase images. The proposed combination of the two imaging modalities (PART - US) for early breast cancer diagnostic applications will be superior to PART imaging alone and to US imaging alone on many important counts: 1) Conventional ultrasound is a mature technology and co-registration can greatly facilitate the integration of our novel PART imaging modality into a commercial system, where photoacoustic and ultrasonic excitation sources will be using the same ultrasonic receiver array; 2) the ultrasound channel can be used for quick screening and identification of biological tissue targets therefore paving the way for real-time PART - US clinical imaging; 3) the co-registered superposition image can exhibit superior specificity by highlighting the presence of blood (in the case of angiogenetic tumors) for better visualization of tumor morphology and location among other contrasting - and possibly confusing- stray signals obtained by each modality alone due to acoustic scatterers and boundary reflections at the surrounding anatomy; 4) using a two-wavelength PART source under development in our system, the relative amplitude strengths of images at the two near-infrared wavelengths will be used to assess the degree of blood oxygenation of ultrasonically delineated tumors, thereby establishing a malignant / benign tumor diagnosis criterion.