Not too long ago while I was scanning through my boyfriend’s monthly subscription of mechanical engineering magazines, I found a page about a “Hand-Held Cancer Scanner.” Being a computer engineering major, whose grandma had recently won the battle against breast cancer, I was intrigued by this new development.
According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation , one in eight women (about 12.4%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of their lifetime. If you personally know someone who has/had breast cancer then you know that, just as important as detecting these abnormalities, is monitoring them and keeping aware of any changes. Furthermore, with the statistical proof of developing invasive breast cancer being as high as almost thirteen percent, you would think that women would get checked more frequently. So why don’t they?
Although this reasoning may differ depending on the individual, the most common reason resides in the fact that the equipment needed to detect lesions and perform procedures to test for breast cancer— mammograms, MRIs, ultrasounds, and biopsies— are extremely expensive, and even rare in underdeveloped areas.
With this information in mind, Jana Kainerstorfer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and second-year doctoral student, Constance Robbins, offer an alternative method.
Robbins states that, with their new development, they are NOT trying to replace mammograms but rather, “If [an individual] is having results that are inconclusive, but there’s not enough of a risk to justify a biopsy right away, then that would be something we could use this device for.”
According to Carnegie Mellon University researchers, this newly developed device “uses near-infrared light to optically image the tissue.” Since malignant tissue contains greater water concentration and less lipid concentration than the surrounding tissue, it creates a “topographic image that can be examined for the size, shape, stiffness, and location of the deformation.” These researchers say that they have developed a “spatial frequency domain imaging,” which offers two-dimensional images to be seen through an inexpensive, portable system or device.
Kainerstorfer states that, as of right now, the only obstacle to developing this device is that “the light source is a projector and the camera can be a cellphone camera, [therefore] the depth of penetration is limited to only the superficial tissue layers.”
However, Kainerstorfer expresses that they are “compressing tissue” so that the depth of the imaging does not create a problem when testing the device.
According to Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering, researchers developed a breast cancer mimicking models, also known as “optical phantoms,” to visually display the effectiveness of the device’s imaging.
As a result, Kainerstorfer says that they were able to successfully demonstrate that, “we can [optically] image lesions, even [the lesions] deep inside the phantoms when compression was applied,” and that this alone, “was proof of concept.”
Besides this being an opportunity to help increase our current knowledge of the human body, it is a development that I feel people of all interests should know about.
Research has shown that women of all races are just as likely to get breast cancer and that not one single race is singled out.
As I said before, my grandma is a recent breast cancer survivor, and although my family was fortunate enough to afford treatment, there are families out there who cannot. But by significantly cutting the prices and minimizing the size and amount of equipment required, this new development will give more women the opportunity to get tested for breast cancer.
With this ability, the reliance we have on funding for breast cancer research will be lessened, more women will survive breast cancer, and less children (and people in general) will have to lose their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sister, cousins, etc.
Furthermore, although this device is still in the development phase, Kainerstorfer says that they plan on exposing the device to human testing sometime within the next six months.
