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Dartmouth & PerkinElmer collaboration funded

Posted in News

Together with its industry partner PerkinElmer, Dartmouth has received NIH funding for a proposal entitled “Optical Scatter Imaging System for Surgical Specimen Margin Assessment during Breast Conserving Surgery.”

Breast conserving surgery is done routinely but has a high rate of subsequent surgery when cancer is found in the margin of the tissue removed. In fact, approximately one third of all patients are recalled for a second tumor excision when either residual cancer or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) are found on the specimen surface or within 1-2 mm of it following pathology analysis in the days after the initial procedure.

There is a need for an accurate surgeon-assist device that can determine if the resected tissue is clear of cancer at the margins. This problem has a direct solution, however, through optical technology optimized for widefield and volumetric scanning, coupled with computer-aided decision making.  Dartmouth and PerkinElmer will combine wide-field optical scatter spectroscopic imaging with volumetric CT scanning of specimens in a package that integrates the substantial pre-clinical experience by the PerkinElmer team with the substantial prototyping and clinical specimen imaging work of the Dartmouth team.

The combined system will initially be completed followed by testing of training data sets on known tissue samples from the breast lesion tissue bank. Following validation, a prospective trial will be carried out on the system to help determine the accuracy in margin identification. Taken together this will be one of the first comprehensive approaches to volumetric and surface scanning in a single package, and it comes from two groups with substantial experience in the aspects of cancer imaging and system development.