Many types of cancer treatments cause blood vessels in tumors to become damaged. A reduced network of blood vessels can reduce the delivery of nutrients to the tumor, which starves and kills the tumor. To evaluate the status of the tumor blood vessels soon after starting drug treatment or radiation therapy, we have developed a new imaging method known as Dynamic Contrast Enhancement MultiSpectral Optoacoustic Tomography (DCE MSOT). This method tracks the delivery of a clinically-approved chemical agent into the tumor, to gauge the delivery of nutrients to the tumor. Our DCE MSOT method uses a unique calculation that measures the delivery rate into tumors, which has good accuracy, low var...

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Many types of cancer treatments cause blood vessels in tumors to become damaged. A reduced network of blood vessels can reduce the delivery of nutrients to the tumor, which starves and kills the tumor. To evaluate the status of the tumor blood vessels soon after starting drug treatment or radiation therapy, we have developed a new imaging method known as Dynamic Contrast Enhancement MultiSpectral Optoacoustic Tomography (DCE MSOT). This method tracks the delivery of a clinically-approved chemical agent into the tumor, to gauge the delivery of nutrients to the tumor. Our DCE MSOT method uses a unique calculation that measures the delivery rate into tumors, which has good accuracy, low variability, and can be performed within seconds, which are great improvements relative to existing DCE imaging methods. We propose to study mouse models of pancreatic cancer that are undergoing drug treatment or radiation therapy. We will compare our new DCE MSOT method with two older imaging methods, DCE MRI and DCE US, to determine the improvement that DCE MSOT can provide when evaluating the early response to treatment that reduces the network of tumor blood vessels. We will also compare our DCE MSOT measurements of tumor vascular delivery rates with measurements of tumor oxygenation performed with MSOT, to demonstrate that these combined measurements can improve evaluations of tumor blood vessels soon after starting treatment. These studies are designed to show that DCE MSOT is a “game changing” technology for cancer imaging that can eventually be translated to the cancer radiology clinic.

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