Compared with blood flow in healthy tissues, tumor blood flow is abnormal, and these abnormalities
According to Janaki Senaratna, ResearcherPathak’s laboratories and one of the creators of the program, studying the architecture of blood vessels and the dynamics of their blood flow in tumors can give an idea about the progression of cancer and its metastasis. This approach can accelerate the development of new treatments aimed at the blood vessels of the tumor in order to limit the flow of nutrients to it and oxygen. HemoSYS can also lead to a more efficient delivery of available drugs by mapping blood flow fluctuations in the vessels that feed the tumor.
Tumor blood vessels are her vitalan important channel for survival and growth, providing it with nutrients, and also enable tumor cells to spread to other parts of the body. These vessels often grow inconsistently and create abnormal blood flow patterns, which makes them a huge obstacle to the effective delivery of therapeutic agents.
“Abnormal blood flow makes it difficultpredicting the effectiveness of treatment, and if not enough drug is delivered to the tumor, the cancer may recur or develop resistance to treatment or increase harmful side effects.”
Arvind Pathak is an assistant professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Johns Hopkins researchers warn thatThe research tool is not yet directly related to human tumors. But, says Pathak, “as our ability to obtain high-resolution images in the clinic improves, we hope that this tool can be adapted to provide a noninvasive way to analyze blood flow fluctuations in an individual patient's cancer and help tailor their therapy.”
For development of HemoSYS Pathak Labattracted biomedical engineers and biophysicists to develop accurate and effective methods for quantifying the “multivariate” data consisting of tumor blood flow, blood volume, and oxygenation images. A different type of light source was used to collect each of these variable data from tumors implanted in animals.
“As a rule, researcha laboratory studying these blood vessel systems must have extensive experience in image processing to quantify the relationship between these measurements. HemoSYS allows researchers with no programming experience to analyze this multidimensional image data.”
Arvind Pathak is an assistant professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
HemoSYS program uses fundamentalengineering principles for the analysis and integration of various types of data collected by various visualization methods. These data allow scientists to strictly map the entire "hemodynamic landscape" of the studied tumor. The result is a colorful, but informative visualization that shows the relationship between blood flow, oxygenation, and tumor cells in vibrant red, blue, and green.
The system allows doctors to see what's in the tumorthere may be an area with a low oxygen content caused by poor blood flow, or see that there is little oxygen in the area, although there is an increased volume of blood in it. The program can be adapted to interact with other imaging methods - such as MRI, ultrasound and dynamic CT.