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

TY - JOUR

T1 - An optoacoustic imaging feature set to characterise blood vessels surrounding benign and malignant breast lesions

AU - Abeyakoon, O.

AU - Woitek, R.

AU - Wallis, M. G.

AU - Moyle, P. L.

AU - Morscher, S.

AU - Dahlhaus, N.

AU - Ford, S. J.

AU - Burton, N. C.

AU - Manavaki, R.

AU - Mendichovszky, I. A.

AU - Joseph, J.

AU - Quiros-Gonzalez, I.

AU - Bohndiek, S. E.

AU - Gilbert, F. J.

N1 - Funding Information: This study was funded by the following sources: University of Cambridge capital equipment fund; NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre ( BRC-1215-20014* ); EPSRC-CRUK Cancer Imaging Centre in Cambridge and Manchester (grant no. C197/A16465 ); Cancer Research UK (grants C14303/A17197 , C47594/A16267 ); and the Austrian Science Fund ( J4025-B26 ). SM received a UKRI Medical Research Council exchange fellowship. FJG received funding from the National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator award. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. We would like to thank Turid Torheim for their helpful contributions to the study. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors

PY - 2022/9

Y1 - 2022/9

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Breast cancer

KW - Hybrid imaging

KW - Photoacoustic imaging

KW - Ultrasound

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85134642690

U2 - 10.1016/j.pacs.2022.100383

DO - 10.1016/j.pacs.2022.100383

M3 - Article

C2 - 36068806

AN - SCOPUS:85134642690

SN - 2213-5979

VL - 27

JO - Photoacoustics

JF - Photoacoustics

M1 - 100383

ER -