Interstitial Assessment of Architectural Heterogeneity in Prostate Cancer Using a Fine Needle Photoacoustic Probe

The primary aim of this study is to demonstrate that our fine needle PA probe can acquire reliable measurements of prostate glands. This will be indicated by a signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements that is larger than one.

We will calculate the signal to noise ratio of the signals as the peak-to-peak signal magnitude over the amplitude of the system background signal. The technical failure is that we will not be able to achieve measurements with signal-to-noise ratios larger than 1 in 10% of the measurements. We will have a futility analysis after first 5 patients are completed (thus 10 measurements). If of those 10 measurements, 2 have a SNR less 1, then the study will be stopped as it is unlikely to meet its 90% target.

The secondary aim of this study is documenting our ability to observe differences between the PASA linear slope values derived from benign and cancerous regions, i.e., to detect the difference of 0.05 of 0.19, 0.17, 0.14, 0.20 dB/MHz between the means of the linear slopes in benign and cancerous regions at the wavelengths of 1220 nm, 1370 nm, 800 nm and 266 nm, respectively.

We will aim at differentiating the measurements in benign and cancerous regions at specific wavelengths. We have a null hypothesis for each wavelength that at this specific wavelength, our measurement cannot differentiate the benign and cancerous regions. We will test the hypothesis with paired t-tests.