August 23, 2017

3D Surface Imaging Technique for Breast Cancer

My name is Olivia Tong and I am a MESc candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering under Drs. Jeffrey Carson and Mamadou Diop at Lawson Health Research Institute.

We are developing a non-contact scanner that can monitor the blood oxygen level in the tumor during chemotherapy. The success of this project will lead to a new diagnostic method that can quickly identify the most effective chemotherapy drug for each breast cancer patient. You might have seen Lawrence Yip’s blog posts regarding Photoacoustic Imaging Research. For this scanner, we also use photoacoustic imaging to detect breast tumors. As an improvement, we are building a non-contact system. I am working on a component of this non-contact scanner that captures the 3D shape of the breast using 3D surface imaging technique. The 3D information of the breast is important for reconstructing the photoacoustic images collected by the other component of the scanner.

The support of TBCRU enabled me to purchase a commercial structured light scanner for the development of my system. My next step is to evaluate the performance of my system on a small group of human subjects before integrating my component into the non-contact scanner. For this project, we also collaborate closely with clinicians at the breast cancer center at St. Joseph’s Hospital and researchers at McMaster University.

This May, I have the opportunity to meet with our collaborators and learn more about biomedical optics. I am very grateful to be supported by TBCRU and work for this amazing project.

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