Pilot Investigation of Ultrasound Imaging and Spectroscopy as Early Indicators of Locally- Advanced Breast Cancer Response to Neoadjuvant Treatment
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Summary
This work explores the possibility of using ultrasound imaging and spectroscopy as a way of monitoring cell death, hence, tumour response to treatment. The hypothesis here is that it can be used as a way of monitoring early response to cancer treatment and predicting which patients continue on in their therapy to have a complete pathological response as a primary endpoint and tumour size decrease as a secondary endpoint. If this work is successful it could be used in the future early on in a cancer patient's treatment to predict whether or not a course of chemotherapy or radiotherapy is going to be successful. For example, in patients in which the analysis indicates a poor response the chemotherapy regimen could be changed to a more efficacious one or for those receiving radiotherapy predicted to have a poor response a radiosensitizing agent could be used to improve outcome.
Description
The primary objective in this study is to identify optimal ultrasound spectroscopy parameters that can be used as an early predictor of pathological complete or partial response in women with locally advanced breast cancer receiving treatment with chemotherapy or combined modality chemotherapy and radiotherapy. A secondary objective is to perform an inter-user variability comparison by comparing second site data analysis outcomes with central co-coordinating site data analysis. The overarching goal of this research is to transform the delivery of neoadjuvant chemotherapy using quantitative ult…