Vedantham Works Toward Better Breast Cancer Imaging

The National Cancer Institute  recently awarded a five-year, $3.6 million R01 grant to advance the research of Srinivasan Vedantham, a University of Arizona professor of medical imaging who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, toward detecting breast cancer at its earliest stage.

The funding enables Vedantham and his colleagues to further improve the identification of cancerous breast tissue. The Biomedical Imaging Innovation and Clinical Translation in Next-Gen CT, or BIG-CT, team will design, develop and clinically evaluate a new generation of breast-specific computerized tomography that will provide 3D images of breast tissue. Their unique patient-positioning design alleviates the need for breast compression that often is painful for patients undergoing mammograms.

The researchers anticipate the fully 3D nature of their tomographic images will improve the detection of abnormal findings and quickly allow doctors to determine whether the findings are malignant or noncancerous.