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News — Lung cancer can advance quickly. Once a person starts treatment, it is vital to know if that treatment is working or if the patient should be switched to a different treatment. New advanced imaging technology at may give doctors a way to quickly track how well their patients are doing with a certain treatment.

Scientists at and the have discovered a novel way to image the unique blood supply of the lungs. Their findings suggest it could help determine if lung cancer treatment is working.

Pioneering EXPLORER gives scientists a peek inside the workings of the lungs

The groundbreaking research uses , an innovative PET scanner invented at UC Davis and housed at the UC Davis Health Molecular Imaging Center in Sacramento. EXPLORER provides images of the body in minutes with higher quality and less radiation than traditional positron emission tomography (PET) scanners.

Findings from the new lung cancer study were published in the . They how for the first time how fast dynamic imaging using an advanced PET scanner, such as EXPLORER, can “see” into organs that have a dual blood supply. The lungs receive deoxygenated blood from the and oxygenated blood from the .

Viewing the dual blood supply

Cancer frequently spreads to the lungs from other parts of the body because of this extensive blood supply.

“Our study found that the dual-blood supply effect is bigger in lung tumors than in normal lung tissue. This is why it can be used to spot lung cancer and has the potential to help us understand how it spreads,” said , a professor with the, who is leading the study.

Insights from the study 

Wang added that lung cancers often don’t do well with treatments such as immunotherapy. Analyzing lung tumors with a powerful PET imaging tool may lead to better therapy.

“In this new work, we are combining high frame-rate movies from EXPLORER with advanced math to develop a new PET imaging method. This makes it now possible to see and understand the dual-blood supply in normal lung tissue and lung tumors,” added Yiran Wang, a doctoral candidate in the Wang Lab and the first author of the research paper. He was jointly supervised by , one of the co-inventors of the EXPLORER scanner.

Other UC Davis authors:

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Funding

This research is supported in part by grants R01 CA206187, R01 DK124803, and K12 CA138464. UC Davis has a research agreement and revenue sharing agreement with . No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.