Pre-clinical development of contrast-enhanced magneto-motive ultrasound imaging to aid in colorectal cancer detection and staging

Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK. Treatment commonly involves major surgery, which although potentially curative, carries the risk of short- and long-term morbidity, including the possibility of stoma formation and the consequent impact on quality of life. In some cases, it may be possible to treat patients more conservatively through localised resection, however, critical to this decision-making process is the ability to reliably determine the extent of disease and its potential to spread or metastasise. A key determinant of metastatic potential in colorectal cancer, as well as many other tumours bearing cancers, is the existence of the disease in the lymph nodes local to the tumour however there exists no effective method of imaging lymph nodes to determine this involvement.
In this talk, I will discuss the pre-clinical research we have undertaken in support of developing contrast-enhanced magneto-motive ultrasound (CE-MMUS), a new technique to image colorectal cancer lymph nodes. Our approach aims to unite the benefits of contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging, which has recently been investigated to image lymph nodes, and magnetomotive ultrasound, an emerging technique to delineate lymph nodes from their surroundings based on the mechanical response. Work to date includes volumetric assessment of colorectal cancer lymph nodes in a pre-clinical mouse model, finite element simulation to better understand system parameters and the first proof of principle of CE-MMUS in a pre-clinical model.