An Uplifting Solution for Early Cancer Detection

Oct 04, 2023

As the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women globally, breast cancer is a serious health condition that women need to be aware of. The disease's prevalence has been steadily rising over the years, leading to increasing attention from the medical community and public health organizations. Improved treatment options have contributed to better survival rates, but breast cancer's high prevalence underscores the urgent need for continued research, awareness campaigns, and comprehensive healthcare strategies to effectively combat this deadly disease.

The problems breast cancer causes for patients are multifaceted and can be emotionally, physically, and financially draining. Patients often experience anxiety, fear, and depression upon receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. The treatment journey, which may involve surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and hormone therapy, can be physically demanding, leading to various side effects and complications. Additionally, breast cancer can result in altered body image and self-esteem, affecting the patient's overall quality of life.

In the worst case, aggressive, metastatic tumors can be fatal. This is especially true for late stage cancers, which only have a 25% survival rate. However, if detected in the very early stages, the outlook for breast cancer patients is exceptionally good. In fact, with early detection, the survival rate is about 98%. This means that the worst effects of the disease could be virtually eliminated by simply detecting it in time. Unfortunately, that is not as simple as it sounds.

Diagnosis of breast cancer typically involves some type of medical imaging, like computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, or ultrasound, all of which require a visit to a medical center and the assistance of highly trained professionals to perform the diagnostic procedure. As such, testing is expensive and inconvenient as it stands today. And that means testing is generally infrequent — perhaps once or twice a year.

For those at a high risk of developing breast cancer, that may not be enough. Tumors can develop and aggressively grow in the interval between scans, leading to poor health outcomes. Inspired by the promise offered by early detection, researchers at MIT have developed a new type of wearable ultrasound scanner that could one day perform frequent imaging of breast tissue. The scanner can be fit into a bra, and can provide consistent, accurate imaging without the need for any expertise on the part of the wearer of the device.

The flexible patch sits on top of a special bra that has holes at various points in it to allow for direct skin contact with the sensors. By conforming directly to the breast, this patch can provide clear imaging of deep tissues in all quadrants. While this is very challenging with traditional ultrasound probes, even for a trained operator, this new device makes it easy by adjusting its shape to match the body’s shape. Experiments showed that the flexible patch was capable of capturing ultrasound images rivaling the quality of images produced with traditional probes.

At this time, the wearable scanner must be hooked up to a traditional ultrasound machine to acquire images, so the goal of building a device that can capture images at any time in the home has not yet been achieved. However, the team is working on a miniaturized imaging system, about the size of a smartphone, that could soon enable even daily scanning by untrained individuals at high risk of developing breast cancer. If such a technology could be produced economically, it could nearly put an end to this disease.

Towards the goal of making the system fully self-contained, the researchers are also planning to explore ways that they might incorporate machine learning algorithms into the processing pipeline to automatically detect tumors without requiring the time of medical professionals. And building on these early successes, they also plan to investigate how their technology can be used to scan other parts of the body.