27 May New Optical Tool May Identify Patients At High Risk Of Recurrent Prostate Cancer

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Gabriel Popescu PhD Associate Professor and
Shamira Sridharan, Ph.D. candidate
Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory, Department of Bioengineering, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign Urbana, IL

Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Dr. Popescu: We developed a new optical tool that can identify patients at high risk for recurrence of prostate cancer after undergoing radical prostatectomy as treatment.  Early identification of risk for recurrence can allow early treatment of disease.

Our main finding was that among individuals with worse disease outcomes, the tissue is more disorganized.  This manifests as a decrease in anisotropy, or light scattering angle, which reports on nano-scale differences in tissue architecture.

Medical Research: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?

Shamira Sridharan: Scattering anisotropy is a novel biomarker than can help with prognosis of prostate cancer among individuals with intermediate risk for prostate cancer recurrence.  We are now conducting studies to determine if our method can help with prognosis of high grade cancers, and thus prevent over-treatment of those patients.

Medical Research: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

Dr. Popescu: This tool would be truly useful if we could make prognostic predictions before the patient has undergone surgery for treatment.  Ideally, we would want to examine patients’ biopsies and determine if they would benefit from surgery or active surveillance.  So our main recommendation for future research is to study the applicability of anisotropy as a prognostic marker at the pre-surgical stage.

Citation:

Prediction of Prostate Cancer Recurrence Using Quantitative Phase Imaging

Shamira Sridharan, Virgilia Macias, Krishnarao Tangella, André Kajdacsy-Balla & Gabriel Popescu

Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 9976 doi:10.1038/srep09976

Published 15 May 2015

[wysija_form id=”3″]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Gabriel Popescu PhD (2015). New Optical Tool May Identify Patients At High Risk Of Recurrent Prostate Cancer 

Last Updated on May 29, 2015 by Marie Benz MD FAAD