Microvascular Ultrasonic Imaging of Angiogenesis Identifies Tumors in a Murine Spontaneous Breast Cancer Model.

The purpose of this study is to determine if microvascular tortuosity can be used as an imaging biomarker for the presence of tumor-associated angiogenesis and if imaging this biomarker can be used as a specific and sensitive method of locating solid tumors. Acoustic angiography, an ultrasound-based microvascular imaging technology, was used to visualize angiogenesis development of a spontaneous mouse model of breast cancer ( = 48). A reader study was used to assess visual discrimination between image types, and quantitative methods utilized metrics of tortuosity and spatial clustering for tumor detection.