Design of an electronic marking clip for tracking breast cancer lesions through neoadjuvant chemotherapy using ultrasound identification

Abstract

During the treatment of breast cancer via neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC), radiological clips are used to track lesions. Marking lesions allows them to be located and distinguished from their surroundings post-NAC, but morphological changes to the treated regions due to NAC can affect the visibility of marking clips in ultrasound, sometimes to a degree which requires the use of alternative, less comfortable modalities to visualize the clips in preparation for procedures, such as surgical resection or biopsy. In previous work, we proposed an electronic clip design leveraging active communication with an ultrasound imaging probe, improving visibility and differentiation of clips in ultrasound. The transmitted signal in a prototype of this design was successfully localized and identified by the ultrasound system in post-processing. Presently, we refine the device design by using pseudorandom noise (PN) codes as the ultrasonic identification signals to improve localization, and adjust the system design to allow multiple clips to be active and identified with greater accuracy in the imaging field in real time. [Work supported by a grant from the NIH (R21EB030743) and a fellowship from the Cancer Center at Illinois (CST EP082021).]