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Controlling cell functions for drug development and therapeutic purposes has been an important method in clinic to treat critical diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Modulation of cancer cells and finding specific mutations in cancer are methods to investigate mechanism of outbreak of cancer. The advancement in molecular biology introduced tools to precisely edit genome of cells...
Leukemia commonly leads to hypoxia in the bone marrow, which can then result in increased resistance to chemotherapy. However, the relationship between local hypoxia and disease progression is not well understood, and it is unclear whether hypoxia in the bone marrow is diffuse or focal in presentation. Spectroscopic photoacoustic (PA) imaging-based estimation of blood oxygen saturation (SO2) can be...
For many diseases, such as cancer, simultaneous imaging of different targets can lead to improved diagnosis, better patient prognosis, and therapy guidance/monitoring. PET-CT multiplexing can be cumbersome, costly, and involve radiation exposure. Other modalities such as fluorescent imaging lack clinical and pre-clinical relevance. Therefore, clinically relevant multiplexed imaging is of interest...
Medical imaging through a targeting agent promises to improve the specificity and sensitivity of cancer detection. Nanoparticles (NPs) may provide advantages for targeted photoacoustic (PA) imaging due to their unique physical and optical properties. In our previous study, we developed a phase-change contrast agent made from a biodegradable polymer, poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) and loaded...
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) is one of the most prevalent types of cancer. Studies have shown that PDA treatment with IV administration of gemcitabine (GEM) is inhibited by excessive interstitium and connective tissue (stroma) surrounding the tumor. Ultrasound (US) irradiation combined with drug-loaded polylactic acid (PLA) microbubble contrast agents (MB) may circumvent this through targeted...
Treatment outcomes for esophageal cancer can be significantly improved through early detection. Endoscopy, with or without fluorescence, as well as micro-ultrasound (μUS) have been explored as methods to detect the epithelial cell patterns associated with Barrett's esophagus (BE), a precursor to esophageal cancer. In addition, a characteristic microvascular pattern is associated with high grade dysplasia...
Bleomycin (BLM) is a promising chemotherapeutic that causes oxidative damage to DNA resulting in cell death. However, this non-permeant drug is mainly internalized via receptor-mediated endocytosis. Therefore, tumors showing a poor expression of BLM-binding proteins are resistant to this therapy. This work aims to demonstrate the ability to improve the intracellular accumulation and efficacy of BLM...
The acoustic microstreaming originating from microbubbles' linear oscillations can be used as a potential cell sonoporation tool for drug delivery and gene transfection. However, this bubble-based method suffers from bubble instability, non-uniform size, unreliable performance, and inconvenient trapping. In order to overcome the above drawbacks, in this study, we proposed a massive drug delivery method...
Changes in microvascular structure and flow is of clinical importance in the study of a number of disease processes such as cancer and diabetes. Ultrasound is often the primary imaging procedure performed to determine appropriate treatment or surgery for testicular lesions. Currently, however, differentiation and diagnosis of both benign and malignant testicular tumours such as seminomas, leydig cell...
Phase-change contrast agents (PCCAs) provide advantages over conventional microbubble contrast agents, including increased circulation time and the ability to extravasate from leaky tumor vasculature. Additionally, PCCAs can be vaporized into echogenic microbubbles for diagnostic ultrasound imaging. Previous studies have demonstrated that the vaporization threshold of PCCAs is higher in vivo than...
Prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis still relies on systematic biopsy due to the insufficient reliability of imaging techniques. In this work, we introduce a new method to quantify contrast agent convective dispersion (D) and velocity (v) in a three-dimensional dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (3D DCE-US) recording. First, the concentration gradients of the data are established using Gaussian derivatives...
Tumor growth requires angiogenesis and neovascularization, resulting in the formation of microvessels which differ in their morphology from those of healthy tissue. These vascular abnormalities result in altered blood flow dynamics, which can be assessed by dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (DCE-US). Two distinct approaches are typically employed in DCE-US: the assessment of either perfusion or...
Spectroscopic photoacoustic (sPA) can estimate blood oxygen saturation (SO2), which has been shown to correlate with hypoxia, and therefore could improve cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring. However, accurate quantification of SO2 is often not straightforward as local fluence varies significantly at depth due to wavelength-dependent optical scattering and absorption. Additionally, assessing...
Photoacoustic (PA) imaging has been proposed for cancer treatment monitoring. Tumor oxygen saturation (sO2) should in principle be related to vascular parameters such as blood flow. In this work, in-vivo PA estimates of sO2 were compared to power Doppler (pD) measures of vascularity hours after the administration of microbubbles (MB), radiation therapy (XRT), individually or combined (MB-XRT).
Current liver cancer ablation methods are mainly thermal-based and inherently exhibit inconsistent tissue ablation due to irregular heat dissipation. Histotripsy is a non-thermal ultrasound (US) ablation method that fractionates tissue through the precise control of acoustic cavitation. This paper studies the feasibility and chronic effects of non-invasive histotripsy for liver cancer ablation in...
Pancreatic cancer is associated with poor clinical outcomes primarily, due to the advanced stage of disease at diagnosis. Harmonic contrast-enhanced endoscopic ultrasound has been proposed as an imaging approach for characterizing pancreatic masses. As an alternative, transabdominal subharmonic imaging has been proposed to limit invasiveness and better suppress nonlinear tissue echoes. In both of...
Pancreatic cancer is associated with poor clinical outcomes primarily due to the advanced stage at the time of diagnosis. Endoscopic harmonic ultrasound imaging (HI) is being used to characterize pancreatic masses. Alternatively, transabdominal subharmonic imaging (SHI) may limit invasiveness and better suppress nonlinear tissue echoes. In both approaches, time-intensity curve (TIC) analysis can be...
To explore the extravascular space, sub-micron phase-change droplets show widespread interest in medical imaging and therapy with various modalities, such as ultrasound and photoacoustic. Existing studies (Wilson 2012, Wei 2014) on such dual-modality contrast agents have demonstrated the generation of both optical and ultrasound contrast after optical activation. However these studies did not explore...
Sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) are the first draining lymph nodes when metastatic cancer cells are spreading. Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB), which is performed invasively, is the current standard treatment to determine whether the cancer cells are spreading or not. A non-invasive SLN imaging modality along with fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) would be beneficial for staging the axillary lymph...
Cancer growth requires angiogenesis; imaging of angiogenesis may thus improve cancer diagnostics and therapy monitoring. Dynamic contrast enhanced ultrasound (DCE-US) permits imaging angiogenesis at the molecular level by using novel targeted ultrasound contrast agents (tUCA). These agents consist of functionalized microbubbles obtained by engineering their shell with targeting ligands able to bind...
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