Breast Cancer Imaging
BRITISH DIT-PRJ-08-085
Status NOT active project
DISI role Coordinator
Project type Education and Mobility Project
Dimension International
Acquisition date 2008-12-12
Start date 2008-12-31
End date 2009-12-31
Project details
Project astract Breast cancer is the commonest cause of death in women between the ages of 35 and 55 in Europe. National breast screening programmes, utilising X-ray mammography, represent the front-line screening weapon in the fight to improve survival statistics. The equipment is expensive, bulky and uncomfortable in use. Frequency of screening is limited by the radiation exposure and hence most tumours are larger than 10mm at detection, by which point the cancer may have spread to other parts of the body.<br/>X-ray screening has not in fact reduced breast cancer deaths, and it is known that the technique is associated with large numbers of both false positives and false negatives. It performs especially badly in the dense breasts of younger (especially pre-menopausal) women - for this reason, and the radiation dose, it is not offered routinely to women under 50.<br/>Electromagnetic radiation in the UWB band (3-10.6 GHz) is non-ionising and does not present the same dangers as X-ray (at low powers it is entirely harmless and will not cause heating). There is a dielectric contrast of 10-400% between tumours and healthy tissue in this band, and hence incident radiation will be reflected from a tumour, allowing its detection.<br/>The team at Bristol are unique in the world in having designed and evaluated a clinical prototype of an ultrawideband (UWB) imaging radar for breast cancer detection. Significant obstacles remain to be overcome, especially as regards the denser breasts of pre-menopausal women, however it undoubtedly has the potential to meet the need for a portable, cheap, fast, freely repeatable imaging system, without employing ionising radiation. <br/>The technique used at Bristol is a multistatic radar system, that yields an image of reflections from within the breast much like any other radar system. The system is reliable, simple but relatively crude and does not, for example, yield the actual dielectric properties of the breast merely a map of reflections.<br/>An alternative, much more sophisticated approach is to employ a so-called inverse scattering method, where the actual observed radar data is compared to the corresponding data from a model of the hypothesized breast structure. The hypothesis is then iteratively refined until the observed data matches that of the model. This is extremely computationally demanding and the formulations are quite complex, especially when the observed data is noisy and imperfect.<br/>The team at University of Trento are world-leading experts in the application of inverse scattering techniques, and the aim of this proposal is to bring together Bristol's unique experimental expertise with the inverse scattering methodologies developed in Trento. <br/>The goals of the proposed exchange project are therefore:<br/>1) The development of realistic biological three dimensional phantoms able to take into account the heterogeneous mixture of fat and fibro-glandular tissues typical of normal breast. <br/>2) The exchange of real data obtained from phantoms or real patients.<br/>3) The development of innovative multi-frequency microwave imaging systems which can effectively deal with real measured data obtained from realistic biological phantom or real patients; <br/>4) The development of advanced numerical algorithms able to process in real-time data processing of the acquired data is mandatory for a fast diagnosis and in order to perform a wide screening, in order to accomplish this goal, processing techniques based on the so called learning by examples techniques will be studied, developed, and assessed; <br/>The secondary but not less important objectives of the project may be summarized as follows: <br/>1) The possibility of a collaboration with other research groups working on the same subject is an opportunity for improving the knowledge on the topics of common interest as well as a good chance for the exchange of experiences and methodologies; <br/>2) Technology transfer in the biomedical field. <br/>
Keywords Breast Cancer Detection, Inverse Scattering, Inverse Problem, Microwaves
Fundings 4200 €