Acoustic Angiography as a Diagnostic Tool for Tumor Response in Radiation Therapy (2014)

Undergraduates: Sneha Rao, Sunny Kasoji

Faculty Advisor: Paul Dayton
Department: Applied Sciences

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Acoustic Angiography is a new ultrasound imaging modality that makes use of dual frequency transmit and receive transducers to generate high-resolution images of vasculature. Previous studies have demonstrated the use of ultrasound in early detection of tumor response to radiation therapy and other preliminary studies have shown that acoustic angiography could be a viable technique to measure early tumor response. This study provides more evidence to support the use of acoustic angiography as a metric for early tumor response. 10 rats were implanted with FSA tumors tissue and 5 rats with tumors less than 1cm were selected to be treated with broad beam radiation. After the initial radiation treatment, all 10 rats were imaged every two days with acoustic angiography for three weeks. Analysis of the tumor perfusion along with tumor volume showed that after the first few days of treatment, there was no statistically significant difference between the tumor volume and tumor perfusion metrics. However, toward the end of the 3 weeks of imaging, the tumor perfusion metric seems to show a greater change between control and treated rats than the tumor volume metric. This suggests that tumor perfusion might be a more reliable metric to detect early changes in tumor response to radiation treatments.