Ultrasound and Near Infrared Imaging for Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Monitoring

The investigators propose to validate the utility of the investigators novel hybrid imaging technique for accurate diagnosis of breast lesions, and for assessing chemotherapy response of cancer treatment and predicting treatment efficacy. The investigators unique hybrid technique is implemented by simultaneously deploying near infrared (NIR) optical sensors and a commercial ultrasound (US) transducer mounted on a hand-held probe, and utilizing co-registered lesion structure information provided by ultrasound to improve the inverse optical tomography reconstruction. As a result, the optical tomography assisted with US has overcome problems associated with intense light scattering and has provided reliable tumor angiogenesis distributions. Initial results with a group of 200 biopsied patients have shown that early stage invasive cancers present two-fold greater total hemoglobin concentration on average than fibroadenomas and other benign lesions. Initial results of advanced cancers have shown that the angiogenesis distribution is highly distorted and heterogeneous, and the distorted distributions correlate with histological microvessel density counts and can be used to assess chemotherapy response.

Objective of this study is to validate the investigators initial results that NIR light guided by ultrasound can improve breast cancer diagnosis and monitor chemotherapy response.

Inclusion criteria

• Women aged 18 years and older who have breast lumps or abnormalities (actual or suspected) are eligible for the study.
• Women and members of all races and ethnic groups are eligible for this study.
• Diagnostic Group: These patients will include women who have breast lumps/lesions visible by ultrasound and are prescribed follow up with an ultrasound-guided biopsy at the UCHC Cancer Center for evaluation and diagnosis of actual/suspected breast abnormalities.
• Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Group: These patients will include women who have breast lumps/lesions visible by ultrasound and have been diagnosed with breast cancers and will undergo neoadjuvant chemotherapy. These patients may be identified from the diagnostic group or after initial diagnosis. Patients will only be enrolled to one of the two groups.
• Process Validation Group: This group will contain data from about five women who did not have ultrasound visible lumps on the day of the planned biopsy. Data from the NIR/US scan will be used to validate instrument measurements.

Exclusion criteria

• All Subjects who fail to meet the inclusion criteria are ineligible for the study.