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Precision targeting for prostate cancer on CBS News

13 March 2019

Revolutionary technology developed at Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ Engineering that guides surgeons performing biopsies and improves prostate cancer detection has been featured on CBS News in America.

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The technology combines MRI scans with ultrasound images to better pinpoint prostate cancer and provide surgeons with a precise location to biopsy. With 1 in 8 men estimated to get prostate cancer in their lifetime, the potential impact of improved treatment and early diagnosis for millions of patients worldwide is vast.

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Professor David Hawkes (Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences), a computational scientist and member of the Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ team that developed SmartTarget, was one of the first patients to benefit from this when the software was used to diagnose his own prostate cancer three years ago and played a vital role in his treatment. Interviewed by CBS Philly about his experience he says, “For anybody who is diagnosed with the likelihood of cancer, it’s quite a shock. But it did give me the opportunity to have that technology used on meâ€. The news segment can be watched in full .

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The software has been evaluated on hundreds of patients to date, including 129 men who took part in a targeted prostate biopsy trial at University College London Hospital (Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾H) during which the software successfully diagnosed more than 90 percent of prostate cancers. Dr Dean Barratt (Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering/CMIC/WEISS), who invented and led the system’s development, explains “We developed the SmartTarget system to equip surgeons with vital information about the size, shape and location of prostate tumours during a biopsy that is otherwise invisible on ultrasound images.â€

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“The software provides them with a clear target. As MRI-targeted biopsies require a very high degree of expertise and experience, we hope that the imagery displayed by SmartTarget will help to bring high accuracy prostate cancer diagnosis to a much wider range of patients and hospitals.â€Ìý

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The team that made this research possible was highly interdisciplinary, involving engineers, computer scientists, clinicians, clinical trial co-ordinators, health economists, and business experts from across Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾, Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ Business PLC (Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾B), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.Ìý The Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ clinical leads were Professor Mark Emberton (Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ Medical Sciences), Professor Caroline Moore (Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ Medical Sciences), and Professor Hashim Ahmed (now at Imperial College London). The technology is based heavily on the patented research of Dr Yipeng Hu (Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering/WEISS) and Rachael Rodell (SmartTarget Ltd) is the lead software engineer responsible for the commercial software product. The SmartTarget software has been commercialised by SmartTarget Ltd, a company spun out by Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøվ’s commercialisation company Â鶹´«Ã½ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾B and the system has been in use by several hospitals in the UK and USA.

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Additional reading:

research paper in European Urology