Best Paper Award at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco

Bruno De Santi (Post-Doc Multi-Modality Medical Imaging, M3I), has been awarded the best paper at the SPIE Photonics West in the Conference Photons Plus Ultrasound – Imaging & Sensing 2025. The paper was presented to open the Conference on 26 January 2025 in San Francisco. The presentation was titled Image analysis of patient data from the hybrid photoacoustic-ultrasound tomography system PAM3 and authored by Bruno De Santi, Rianne Bulthuis, Felix Lucka, Jeroen Veltman, Margreet van der Schaaf, Hendrik Messal, Mariël Brinkhuis, Ben Cox & Srirang Manohar.

The PAM3 breast imaging system enables reconstruction of high-resolution photoacoustic and sound speed images using iterative model-based inversion methods. We imaged the breasts of 14 patients with tumors highly suspect for malignancy. The photoacoustic and sound speed images were compared in an analysis pipeline to conventional imaging, conventional histopathology and, where available, 3D histopathology. The results demonstrated that the combination of photoacoustic and sound speed imaging is valuable for visualizing breast cancer. From photoacoustics we obtain functional information with sound speed providing structural context. We present three cases in detail, where we also discuss the limitations of the method.

This is a milestone in a longstanding collaboration between TechMed Centre University of Twente and Medisch Spectrum Twente (MST), and with PA Imaging, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), University College London (UCL) and Ziekenhuigroep Twente (ZGT).