An optoacoustic imaging feature set to characterise blood vessels surrounding benign and malignant breast lesions

O. Abeyakoon, R. Woitek, M. G. Wallis, P. L. Moyle, S. Morscher, N. Dahlhaus, S. J. Ford, N. C. Burton, R. Manavaki, I. A. Mendichovszky, J. Joseph, I. Quiros-Gonzalez, S. E. Bohndiek (Lead / Corresponding author), F. J. Gilbert (Lead / Corresponding author)

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8 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

Combining optoacoustic (OA) imaging with ultrasound (US) enables visualisation of functional blood vasculature in breast lesions by OA to be overlaid with the morphological information of US. Here, we develop a simple OA feature set to differentiate benign and malignant breast lesions. 94 female patients with benign, indeterminate or suspicious lesions were recruited and underwent OA-US. An OA-US imaging feature set was developed using images from the first 38 patients, which contained 14 malignant and 8 benign solid lesions. Two independent radiologists blindly scored the OA-US images of a further 56 patients, which included 31 malignant and 13 benign solid lesions, with a sensitivity of 96.8% and specificity of 84.6%. Our findings indicate that OA-US can reveal vascular patterns of breast lesions that indicate malignancy using a simple feature set based on single wavelength OA data, which is therefore amenable to application in low resource settings for breast cancer management.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100383
Number of pages9
JournalPhotoacoustics
Volume27
Early online date4 Jul 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2022

Keywords

  • Breast cancer
  • Hybrid imaging
  • Photoacoustic imaging
  • Ultrasound

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
  • Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging

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