Improved diagnostics in cancer detection and therapy

Computed tomography (CT) based on X-rays plays a central role in cancer detection. Unfortunately, the procedure itself can pose a health risk due to the high radiation exposure. An innovative approach opens up new possibilities by supplementing it with harmless radar radiation.

Imaging techniques have become indispensable in medicine for the diagnosis of diseases, but also for the monitoring of treatments. Computed tomography (CT) using X-rays plays a central role in the diagnosis of cancer. However, the procedure also has the disadvantage of posing a health risk itself. 
 

Radar as a new technique

It is therefore advisable to supplement pure X-rays with other imaging techniques. Radar imaging also provides 3D data. The process is already standard in security applications, but in the medical field it is an outsider, despite being harmless to health. 

The challenge for medical applications is to achieve a sufficiently high resolution. Compared to other methods, however, it offers the possibility of deriving direct material information.

The aim of “Multi-Med” is to demonstrate the beneficial medical use of the combination of X-ray and radar CT. To this end, methods for the co-registration of imaging systems are being developed in order to harmonize the radar data with the X-ray data. The radar reconstruction algorithm will be expanded and the resolution and image quality will be increased using a-priori information. Hand in hand with this, the X-ray CT reconstruction is extended by the material-specific information obtained with radar, thus developing a multimodal CT algorithm to increase the quality and information density of the 3D data, reduce artifacts and lower the radiation dose introduced. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the multimodal system, specific measurement phantoms are being developed that produce realistic signals on both measurement modalities and enable reproducible validation of the methods without having to work with real tissue. The final result is a multimodal laboratory system that demonstrates the fusion of the two imaging modalities.