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Nov.
18, 2002 |
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 a new
drugs, on capillary growth.
The patent-pending system, developed by a team
led by Badri Roysam, director of the Center for Subsurface Sensing
and Imaging Systems at Rensselaer, will significantly improve
the search for better cancer-fighting drugs, says Harvard's Edward
Brown.
Brown, researcher in the Department of Radiation
Oncology at Harvard Medical School, is using the mapping system
in a 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 3-D 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. The
system at Rensselaer 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.
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