Transcription:
If I told you that one of the methods for treating the second deadliest cancer in men used
ultrasound, the same imaging technique that produces grainy and incomplete images of children
in the womb, would you be surprised?
Well since I’m here, the answer is yes we do. One of the methods that we use to treat
prostate cancer in men uses ultrasound to get the image of the prostate. Where we use it to
guide needles that will be placed into the prostate and loaded with radiation seeds that are then
used to treat prostate cancer. Now, ultrasound does have its ups and downs, but for this
particular method it’s useful because its cheap, doesn’t add any additional radiation, you can
clearly see the needles as they’re placed in the prostate, and it occurs in real-time.
In my mind the biggest gap though with ultrasound use, not just in radiation oncology,
but other departments as well is the fact that there are so many different techniques that are
available, but we don’t use them. The one I spoke about at the beginning that most people are
familiar with, is the B-mode grayscale, but there are tons of other ones that are under utilized
across the board and that’s where my research comes in.
The first equation that we’ll see at the top here, is showing multi-frequency imaging that
is added together. Now the basic principle of ultrasound is the fact that we are propagating
sound waves into the body and depending on the material that it interacts with will either get
transmitted or reflected back. The ultrasound images are ultimately a collection of these echoes.
Now by changing the sound frequency we are going to change how we get these images. So for
higher frequencies, we’re going to get better image quality, but it won’t penetrate as deeply into
the body. And for lower frequencies we will be able to penetrate more deeply, but get a little bit
less image quality. So my hope is that we’ll be able to combine these into an overall better
image quality.
The second equation that we see here includes color doppler. This one is more
commonly used as it assesses blood flow in the body. Our hope is that we’re be able to use this
actually localize the tumor location and this is by the fact that tumor blood vessels are more
densely spaced than normal tissue, so we can use it to visualize where the tumor is and more
effectively treat the tumor and focus our treatments to that area and spare the normal tissue
around it.
Now these images are still noisy and grainy, but this is just a proof of concept to show
that we are indeed adding value by combining these images together. And it is our hope that
these messy images that aren’t always clear, but they bring so much joy to new parents will also
bring joy to our cancer patients and have them have a successful treatment.
Thank you so much.
