A Rensselaer research team has developed an automated system to map blood vessels in tumors. The patent-pending system will aid in the search for better cancer-fighting drugs.

Speeding Up Cancer Research

A promising approach to fighting cancer is to shut off a tumor’s blood supply by preventing new capillaries from forming in abnormal tissue. For this to happen, researchers must understand how the blood vessels form in tumors.

Rensselaer researchers have developed an automated system to map these blood vessel networks. For the first time, medical scientists can quickly and precisely measure blood vessel properties to quantify the effects of various agents, such as new drugs, on capillary growth.

The patent-pending system was developed by a team led by Badri Roysam, professor and director of the Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems at Rensselaer. The system will significantly improve the search for better cancer-fighting drugs, says Harvard’s Edward Brown. Brown, a researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, is using the mapping system in collaboration with Northeastern University and other schools.

“The research team at Rensselaer has generated truly impressive algorithms that trace out all the vessels in a 3-D network as well as identify a number of properties of the vessels. This allows us to quantify these vessels accurately for the first time,” Brown says.

Sophisticated microscopes connected to computers can now generate complex three-dimensional images to allow scientists to peer deeper inside live tumors. Until recently, such intricate images took days to quantify because scientists had to manually trace the vessels. Typically, the results were less than perfect. Roysam’s system, however, identifies and traces all the capillaries of a living tumor in less than two minutes.

Rensselaer graduate student Muhammad-Amri Abdul-Karim and former doctoral student Khalid Al-Kofahi ’00 are key members of the Rensselaer team. “We are the only cancer research team in the world that uses a rapid, fully automated tracing algorithm to quickly obtain measurements from 3-D blood vessel images,” Abdul-Karim says.