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Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Kenneth Tichauer and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jovan Brankov at Illinois Institute of Technology have been in funding by the National Institutes of Health to develop an imaging system that will provide the head and neck cancer surgery team at University Medical Center Groningen, led by Dr. Max Witjes, professor of head and neck oncology at UMCG, with a much more efficient way to check if all cancer has been removed during a surgery.

“We’re giving the surgeon the answer right then and there while the patient is still on the surgical table, offering great promise for reducing the need for repeat surgeries and enhancing treatment outcomes,” says Tichauer.

A first prototype of the system, funded by several seed grants, was tested on six patients, with impressive results, which enabled the team to secure NIH funding to redesign the imaging system with plans to conduct a 80-patient clinical study.

Using lessons learned from the prototype, Tichauer and Brankov—along with Simon Parschat (Ph.D. BME Student), Mahsa Imani (Ph.D. BME Student), and Research Associate Wei Zhou—are upgrading the system to improve the clinical workflow and make use of the state-of-the-art in low light imaging technology.

“An improvement in the camera is really going to change our ability to get high quality images, and then we’re going to push that to the absolute limit,” says Tichauer.

All patients in the proposed clinical study will also have their tissue evaluated with a traditional biopsy, the current gold standard, enabling rigorous system evaluation and development.

The team also plans to develop machine-learning algorithms to enable automated detection and localization of insufficient surgical margins to quickly and unequivocally indicate if the cancer has been completely removed.

“These days machine learning and AI methods are a big boom, especially in medical imaging. It’s like a gold rush. It’s something that’s going to change medical imaging rapidly in the foreseeable future,” says Brankov. “At the Medical Imaging Research Center at Illinois Tech, we’ve been at the forefront and have been working on these methods since the 90s.”

While the clinical study will focus on head and neck cancer patients, Tichauer says it would be straightforward to eventually expand the method to other types of cancer surgeries. Tichauer and Brankov already have an ongoing parallel project evaluating tumor-draining lymph nodes for cancer during surgery.

Image: [From left to right] Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Kenneth Tichauer and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jovan Brankov

Disclaimer: “Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1R01DE033449-01. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.”

Kenneth Tichauer, “Ex Vivo Intraoperative Surgical Basal Margin Analysis in Head and Neck Cancer Resection: Clinical Validation,” National Institutes of Health; Award Number 1R01DE033449-01