"H-scan, Shear Wave and Bioluminescent Assessment of the Progression of Pancreatic Cancer Metastases in the Liver"

A paper co-authored by PhD student Jihye Baek and Professor Kevin Parker titled "H-scan, shear wave and bioluminescent assessment of the progression of pancreatic cancer metastases in the liver" has been published in the December 2020 issue of Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology. Co-authors include Professor Marvin Doyley and Dr. Rifat Ahmed (UR Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), and Dr. Scott Gerber and Dr. Jian Ye (URMC Department of Surgery). The abstract follows; more information can be found here. 

Abstract: The non-invasive quantification of tumor burden and the response to therapies remain an important objective for imaging modalities. To characterize the performance of two newly optimized ultrasound-based analyses, we applied shear wave and H-scan scattering analyses to repeated trans-abdominal ultrasound scans of a murine model of metastatic pancreatic cancer. In addition, bioluminescence measurements were obtained as an alternative reference. The tumor metastases grow aggressively and result in death at approximately 4 wk if untreated, but longer for those treated with chemotherapy. We found that our three imaging methods (shear wave speed, H-scan, bioluminescence) trended toward increasing output measures with time during tumor growth, and these measures were delayed for the group receiving chemotherapy. The relative sensitivity of H-scan tracked closely with bioluminescence measurements, particularly in the early to mid-stages of tumor growth. The correlation between H-scan and bioluminescence was found to be strong, with a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient greater than 0.7 across the entire series. These preliminary results suggest that non-invasive ultrasound imaging analyses are capable of tracking the response of tumor models to therapeutic agents.