Highly metastatic cancer cells are more likely to escape and form metastases,
and only minimal improvements in treatment can be achieved. Despite metas-
tases being the primary cause of cancer-related mortality, they often proceed
unnoticed. Current imaging modalities rely solely on the morphological fea-
tures of the tumor for characterization, rather than cellular differences. Our
goal is to develop an MR cellular imaging capability for characterizing the po-
tential of breast cancer cells to metastasize and enable early cancer detection
using manganese. Experiments on breast cell lines demonstrated that aggres-
sive cancer cells significantly enhanced on T1 -weighted MR images as a result
of a higher uptake and retention of manganese. These results suggest that dif-
ferences in uptake of manganese can help the detection and characterization
of breast cancers. The proposed technique can also be useful for other cancers,
and could bring a critically needed dimension to cancer imaging.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/44048 |
Date | 19 March 2014 |
Creators | Nofiele Tchouala, Joris Igor |
Contributors | Cheng, Hai-Ling |
Source Sets | University of Toronto |
Language | en_ca |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Thesis |
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