Proceedings Article | 21 October 2016
Proc. SPIE. 9967, Developments in X-Ray Tomography X
KEYWORDS: X-ray optics, Breast cancer, Tumors, Imaging systems, X-rays, Tomography, Receptors, Optical tomography, Tissue optics, X-ray imaging
For early detection and targeted therapy, receptor expression profiling is instrumental to classifying breast cancer into
sub-groups. In particular, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) expression has been shown to have both
prognostic and predictive values. Recently, an increasingly more complex view of HER2 in breast cancer has emerged
from genome sequencing that highlights the role of inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity in therapy resistance. Studies on
such heterogeneity demand high-content, high-resolution functional and molecular imaging in vivo, which cannot be
achieved using any single imaging tool. Clearly, there is a critical need to develop a multimodality approach for breast
cancer imaging. Since 2006, grating-based x-ray imaging has been developed for much-improved x-ray images. In 2014,
the demonstration of fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) guided by x-ray grating-based micro-CT was reported
with encouraging results and major drawbacks. In this paper, we propose to integrate grating-based x-ray tomography
(GXT) and high-dimensional optical tomography (HOT) into the first-of-its-kind truly-fused GXT-HOT (pronounced as
“Get Hot”) system for imaging of breast tumor heterogeneity, HER2 expression and dimerization, and therapeutic
response. The primary innovation lies in developing a brand-new high-content, high-throughput x-ray optical imager
based on several contemporary techniques to have MRI-type soft tissue contrast, PET-like sensitivity and specificity, and
micro-CT-equivalent resolution. This system consists of two orthogonal x-ray Talbot-Lau interferometric imaging chains
and a hyperspectral time-resolved single-pixel optical imager. Both the system design and pilot results will be reported in
this paper, along with relevant issues under further investigation.