A New and Practical PET Detector for Imaging Breast Cancer
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: The aim of this project is to develop new imaging detectors which will lead to improvements in the early detection of breast cancer. Currently, mammography is accepted as the best screening tool for breast cancer. A mammogram is obtained by shining a beam of X-rays through the breast onto a piece of photographic film. The benefit of mammography is that it produces very detailed images of the breast. However, while it does show many cancers at an early stage, it also often gives results that are interpreted as suspicious for cancer in many women who, in fact, do not have breast cancer. These women must go through the psychological and physical distress of a biopsy test to confirm or reject the possibility of cancer. Less than 30% of mammograms which show suspicious features actually indicate a breast cancer. Thus, the other 70% of women have been subjected to an unnecessary biopsy, and often another mammogram. Another difficulty is that high quality mammograms are difficult to obtain in certain groups of patients, for example, those with silicon breast implants, those who have already had breast surgery, and some young women with particularly dense breasts. While mammography, because of its low cost and proven ability to detect cancers, must for the present remain the first stage of screening, it would be very useful to have a second, non-invasive test, which could help to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsy procedures and also provide diagnostic information. Positron Emission Tomography (or PET, for short) is one such possible technique. In PET, a minute amount of a radioactively labeled substance is injected into the body through a vein in the arm. This substance would typically be a close relative of glucose, a sugar which is used by cells to provide energy. Because cancer cells are growing and multiplying rapidly, they require more energy than normal cells and therefore will accumulate more of the "radioactive sugar". An image of the radioactivity in the breast can therefore reveal tumors, which will show up as "hot" regions on the image. PET images differ fundamentally from mammograms in that they are providing a measure of how the breast tissue is functioning, not just the anatomy of the breast. Many things can cause the breast anatomy to appear distorted on a mammogram, cysts being one common example, but only tumors will accumulate large amounts of the radioactive sugar, therefore making PET a more specific tool than mammography. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The goal then is to develop high quality and low cost nuclear medicine imaging procedures which can be used as a second stage of screening. This proposal involves the design and development of a new class of nuclear medicine detectors, designed specifically for imaging the breast. Other research groups have already used nuclear medicine procedures to image the breast, but they have either used existing nuclear medicine scanners (which are designed to image the whole body and are therefore bulky and expensive) or have taken existing detector designs and modified them for breast imaging. We believe that better quality images can be achieved at a lower cost by specifically designing detectors for breast imaging, taking into account the unique geometry of the breast from the very start. The individual detectors must then be combined in an intelligent geometry to form a breast camera which produces images with fine detail and contrast, covers the whole breast, images as close to the chest wall as possible, at a cost which makes it readily available to hospitals throughout the country. Our detectors use the latest fiber-optic technology to allow great flexibility and are based on proven technology, so that the designs proposed can be converted into a clinical device in a reasonable time scale. We believe the research in this proposal will form the basis for the design of a high quality nuclear medicine breast camera which we can then proceed to build, in collaboration with industry, in readiness for clinical trials.