Chemotherapy-Response Monitoring of Breast Cancer Patients Using Quantitative Ultrasound-Based Intra-Tumour Heterogeneities

© 2017 The Author(s). Anti-cancer therapies including chemotherapy aim to induce tumour cell death. Cell death introduces alterations in cell morphology and tissue micro-structures that cause measurable changes in tissue echogenicity. This study investigated the effectiveness of quantitative ultrasound (QUS) parametric imaging to characterize intra-tumour heterogeneity and monitor the pathological response of breast cancer to chemotherapy in a large cohort of patients (n = 100). Results demonstrated that QUS imaging can non-invasively monitor pathological response and outcome of breast cancer patients to chemotherapy early following treatment initiation. Specifically, QUS biomarkers quantifying spatial heterogeneities in size, concentration and spacing of acoustic scatterers could predict treatment responses of patients with cross-validated accuracies of 82 ± 0.7%, 86 ± 0.7% and 85 ± 0.9% and areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.75 ± 0.1, 0.80 ± 0.1 and 0.89 ± 0.1 at 1, 4 and 8 weeks after the start of treatment, respectively. The patients classified as responders and non-responders using QUS biomarkers demonstrated significantly different survivals, in good agreement with clinical and pathological endpoints. The results form a basis for using early predictive information on survival-linked patient response to facilitate adapting standard anti-cancer treatments on an individual patient basis

Distinguishing post-treatment changes from recurrent disease in cholangiocarcinoma: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Three-dimensional techniques for radiotherapy have expanded possibilities for partial volume liver radiotherapy. Characteristic, transient radiographic changes can occur in the absence of clinical radiation-induced liver disease after hepatic radiotherapy and must be distinguished from local recurrence.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>In this report, we describe computed tomography changes after chemoradiotherapy for cholangiocarcinoma as an example of collaboration to determine the clinical significance of the radiographic finding.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Because of improved three-dimensional, conformal radiotherapy techniques, consultation across disciplines may be necessary to interpret post-treatment imaging findings.</p

Automatic Detection and Classification of Breast Tumors in Ultrasonic Images Using Texture and Morphological Features

Due to severe presence of speckle noise, poor image contrast and irregular lesion shape, it is challenging to build a fully automatic detection and classification system for breast ultrasonic images. In this paper, a novel and effective computer-aided method including generation of a region of interest (ROI), segmentation and classification of breast tumor is proposed without any manual intervention. By incorporating local features of texture and position, a ROI is firstly detected using a self-organizing map neural network. Then a modified Normalized Cut approach considering the weighted neighborhood gray values is proposed to partition the ROI into clusters and get the initial boundary. In addition, a regional-fitting active contour model is used to adjust the few inaccurate initial boundaries for the final segmentation. Finally, three textures and five morphologic features are extracted from each breast tumor; whereby a highly efficient Affinity Propagation clustering is used to fulfill the malignancy and benign classification for an existing database without any training process. The proposed system is validated by 132 cases (67 benignancies and 65 malignancies) with its performance compared to traditional methods such as level set segmentation, artificial neural network classifiers, and so forth. Experiment results show that the proposed system, which needs no training procedure or manual interference, performs best in detection and classification of ultrasonic breast tumors, while having the lowest computation complexity

Ultrasound elastography for the differential diagnosis of nipple retraction

Nipple retraction is difficult to diagnose radiologically and extremely worrisome for patients. It occurs most commonly due to pathologies such as previous mastitis or an infiltrative malignancy. With this in mind, the goal of this study was to differentiate benign from malignant lesions of nipple retraction, using the differential characteristics of retroareolar area stiffness, observed by means of the new technological modality of ultrasound elastography (USE)