New Researches Promise Accurate Diagnosis Of Breast Cancer Using Ultrasound & MR
Diagnosing breast cancer has always been hit and miss, at the expense of the patient's wallet due to the expensive screenings like ultrasound, mammography and biopsy.
But researchers are working on drastically improving the accuracy of the diagnosis, as well as cutting down the costs.
Typically, a patient undergoes a series of tests before doctors can confirm cancer of the breast. However, these tests fail around 10-20% of the time where patients are given false or wrong diagnosis, according to University of Twente.
To make diagnose accurate and less expensive, researchers from University of Twente are working on futuristic biopsy robot.
The European research project is named MURAB, or short for MR and Ultrasound Robotic Assisted Biopsy.
UT researcher Foad Sojoodi Farimani explained, "If a mammography shows a suspicious image then we need to take a small piece of tissue for lab examination. But it's difficult to determine precisely where the biopsy should be carried out."
"As a result we overlook too many patients who do indeed have a problem. That's an issue we hope to solve," he added, according to Dotmed.
It is not that MR cannot give out the accurate results for diagnosing breast cancer but it takes 45 to 60 minutes of patient's time. This technique is quite expensive as even wealthier countries cannot afford them. Researchers are emphasizing to cut down the time to just 20 minutes.
"This produces an offline MRI image that you can combine, during the biopsy, with online images from the ultrasound sensor," Fairmani said in explaining the obstacles encountered by the team.
"One of the biggest challenges in this project is to use the precise MR image to locate suspicious tissue in the much more indistinct ultrasound image," he explained.
UT researchers are co-researching with Siemens, KUKA and universities in Verona and Vienna to build the robot.
They combine the best aspects of an MRI scan with cheaper and less precise technologies, such as an ultrasound sensor and a pressure sensor for more accurate diagnosis of breast cancer.
