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Barbara Kram, Editor | April 23, 2007
The dual-procedure scanning approach should not be much more expensive than current MRI, said Dartmouth College researcher Keith Paulsen. The machines used for MRI can cost millions of dollars, but the additional equipment for NIRS would be a fraction of that amount and could be used in conjunction with existing MRI machines. If larger studies prove to be successful and the procedure is deemed valuable enough for insurance reimbursement by the FDA, Paulsen said this new method could become more widely available within the next five years.
The Dartmouth researchers have been working on the project for about four years, receiving several hundred thousand dollars a year from the National Cancer Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health.
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The next step will be to perform a larger number of case studies. The researchers will use volunteers who have breast abnormalities that have been recommended for biopsy. Employing the new dual-procedure approach, they will image the subjects before the biopsy and compare their results to the findings from the biopsy. Dartmouth aims to complete approximately 50 such cases over the next several years.
Paper: "Image-guided optical spectroscopy provides molecular-specific information in vivo: MRI-guided spectroscopy of breast cancer hemoglobin, water, and scatterer size," Colin M. Carpenter et al., Optics Letters, Vol. 32, No. 8, April 15, p. 933-935; abstract at http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=ol-32-8-933.
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