Ultrasound and Photoacoustic Imaging of Breast Cancer: Clinical Systems, Challenges, and Future Outlook

Presently, breast cancer diagnostic methods are dominated by mammography. Although drawbacks of mammography are present including ionizing radiation and patient discomfort, not many alternatives are available. Ultrasound (US) is another method used in the diagnosis of breast cancer, commonly performed on women with dense breasts or in differentiating cysts from solid tumors. Handheld ultrasound (HHUS) and automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) are presently used to generate reflection images which do not contain quantitative information about the tissue. This limitation leads to a subjective interpretation from the sonographer. To rectify the subjective nature of ultrasound, ultrasound tomography (UST) systems have been developed to acquire both reflection and transmission UST (TUST) images. This allows for quantitative assessment of tissue sound speed (SS) and acoustic attenuation which can be used to evaluate the stiffness of the lesions. Another imaging modality being used to detect breast cancer is photoacoustic tomography (PAT). Utilizing much of the same hardware as ultrasound tomography, PAT receives acoustic waves generated from tissue chromophores that are optically excited by a high energy pulsed laser. This allows the user to ideally produce chromophore concentration maps or extract other tissue parameters through spectroscopic PAT. Here, several systems in the area of TUST and PAT are discussed along with their advantages and disadvantages in breast cancer diagnosis. This overview of available systems can provide a landscape of possible intersections and future refinements in cancer diagnosis.