BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! 10: NOT Your Usual Use Of Microwaves!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130423211830.htm

When I think of microwaving something, I usually think of popcorn or my lunch, NOT how microwaves might be used to track the progress of tumor shrinkage during chemotherapy.

But that’s exactly what doctors used it for in a recent study and unlike traditional methods like x-ray mammography and ultrasound, they’ve discovered that microwaves tuned to very particular frequencies seem to pass through surround tissue and only resonate with the tumor. This gives a much, much clearer image of the tumor and therefore allows doctors to measure more accurately what’s going on inside the breast without having to invade it with needles or biopsies.

Why is this significant?

“1) its low cost and portability, especially relative to MRI and X-ray computed tomography (CT);

2) its use of safe nonionizing radiation;

3) its ability to image bulk electrical properties as a feature of tissue that is not imaged by most other modalities;

4) its ability, without the use of contrast agents, to quantitatively reconstruct frequency-dependent permittivity and conductivity profiles of living tissue as a way of identifying physiological conditions of those tissues.

“One possible application of MWT is in the frequent monitoring of tissue for the early detection of disease. For example, there is evidence to suggest that up to 22% of breast cancers detected by repeated mammographic screening naturally regress [1], and the ability to monitor these cancers with nonionizing radiation would be very useful. Significant progress in microwave imaging has been made in the last decade, with experimental prototypes having been used for the imaging of...breast tumors [4]. In addition, promising pilot studies for human breast imaging have been completed [5], [6].”

When the tumor is struck by microwaves at a certain frequency, it conducts electricity in a particular way. When the microwaves are captured on the other side, a computer looks at the differences in electrical conductivity AND CREATES AN IMAGE THAT IS CLEARER THAN USING OTHER METHODS!

The real plus here is that there is no danger of radiation. It doesn’t cost as much. It’s easier to carry this type of microwave unit around than it is to carry x-ray equipment or a an MRI machine (possibly making regular breast cancer screening MUCH MORE ACCESSIBLE to the rest of the women in the world!), and last of all, there’s no need to inject chemicals in order to see the tumor better in other imaging systems.

Promising, eh?

Resources: http://www.ece.umanitoba.ca/~lovetri/Research/PDFs/Journals/JP38.pdf
Image: http://images.sciencedaily.com/2013/04/130423211830.jpg