From the November 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Researchers in Germany develop dark-field CT prototype

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich showed in February they could derive more insight about human tissue for diagnosis through a combination of CT scanning and dark-field X-ray imaging.


Dark-field imaging provides information that conventional X-rays cannot on fine tissue structures, especially the lung. In conventional X-ray imaging, X-rays are attenuated by intervening tissue as they travel to the source of the detector. This creates images with varying degrees of attenuation that are based on tissue type and structures. When the X-rays interact with materials of different densities, such as an interface, they scatter. Dark-field imaging assesses this scattering effect to obtain more information on very fine tissue structures.

Technical challenges have made it hard to develop a dark-field CT device to the scale needed to assess human beings. But through their work, TUM researchers have developed a prototype that combines both technologies to produce 3D dark-field X-ray images. And it has already been used with a thorax phantom that depicts the upper human body and is large enough to repeat intended applications on real patients.

AI and CT combine to predict efficacy of immunotherapy for melanoma
Artificial intelligence has helped more accurately predict immunotherapy treatment outcomes for melanoma, according to Columbia University researchers in a March paper in JAMA Oncology.

The researchers created a machine learning algorithm that looked at patient CT scans and made a biomarker, called a radiomic signature, that correlated with “high accuracy” evaluating how well the melanoma would respond to immunotherapy.

“We hope to take a patient early on who looks like they are not doing well on a given therapy because of their signature and enhance, change, or add another drug to the therapy,” author Dr. Lawrence H. Schwartz of the Department of Radiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons said in a statement.

Plans now call for the project to broaden to other types of tumors — including lung, colon, prostate and renal, and to treatments other than immunotherapy.

At present, tumor size is the main way to determine therapy benefit. “Most of the current response criteria were developed several decades ago to assess the response to systemic treatments like chemotherapy,” noted first author Dr. Laurent Dercle of the Department of Radiology at the college. Since immunotherapy can lead to a transitory enlargement of tumors before a response, “we needed to create new tools in order to predict treatment success,” he added.

November 2022 Magazine

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