The first phase of a clinical testing a new imaging device — that doesn’t use X-rays — has been found to successfully detect malignancies in breasts using a combination of near infrared light and ultrasound.

Currently X-ray mammography plays a critical role in detecting breast cancer, but it isn’t a perfect diagnostic tool. Sometimes it can give a false positive or false negative reading and it also exposes patients to low levels of ionizing radiation which can carry some, albeit a small, risk.

The results of the first phase of the clinical testing on 12 patients were recently published in the open-access journal Optics Express. It found that the device — known as the Twente Photoacoustic Mammoscope — was effective in distinguishing malignant tissue with high-contrast images of tumors.

The study compared images from the Photoacoustic Mammoscope (or PAM) with X-Ray mammography to see whether or not the new technique was effective at identifying malignant tissues, explained researcher Michelle Heijblom, a PhD student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands where the device was developed.

The new imaging device is a hybrid which uses optical and acoustical imaging techniques to detect tumours. The breast is illuminated with near infrared light — which is absorbed by hemoglobin in the blood. Since malignances have a lot of blood around them to make them grow, the malignant tissues absorb the light. With that absorption there is a small temperature increase which then “propagates” through the tissue as a sound wave, explains Heijblom. Then using ultrasound an image of the breast and the tumour is produced.

“You can see very clearly what’s malignant and what’s not malignant”, said Heijblom. “The malignant tissue appears as grey white, while the healthy tissue appears dark.”

In the test Heijblom found the new device was able to locate the same malignancies as were found using plain ultrasound and X-ray mammography.

Results from this study will help further refine and develop the Photoacoustic Mammoscope, Heijblom said.

“I hope this will become a valuable tool in the future,” Heijblom said. “It’s quite important. But it’s still quite preliminary.”

However, it will be some years before the new imaging device becomes part of the routine arsenal used to detect breast cancer. “We still need to do much more research to detect all kinds of lesions,” she said. “We want to graduate to less suspicious lesions to see what we can differentiate.”