AAPM President John Bayouth (left) with Professors Paul Meaney (center) and John Weaver (right) at the 2014 Awards and Honors Ceremony in Austin, Texas.

A team of Dartmouth researchers working to improve breast imaging techniqes received The Moses and Sylvia Greenfield Award for the best paper (other than Radiation Dosimetry) published in Medical Physics by The American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) for 2013. The team includes engineering professors Paul Meaney and Keith Paulsen, and adjunct professor of engineering John Weaver.

The paper, entitled "Integration of microwave tomography with magnetic resonance for improved breast imaging”—Med. Phys. 40, 103101 (2013)—details how and why the team overcame "integration challenges associated with combining MT with MR to produce a new coregistered, multimodality breast imaging platform: magnetic resonance microwave tomography."

"This research demonstrates that microwave imaging can produce clinically valuable information and in this context can significantly add value to MR imaging by dramatically improving the specificity for the fused modality configuration," says Professor Meaney. "The award is a validation of our commitment to translating a unique microwave tomographic imaging system into the clinic."

MR data helps differentiate three areas of interest into distinct regions with specialized meshing.

The abstract further reads, "Breast magnetic resonance imaging is highly sensitive but not very specific for the detection of breast cancer. Opportunities exist to supplement the image acquisition with a more specific modality provided the technical challenges of meeting space limitations inside the bore, restricted breast access, and electromagnetic compatibility requirements can be overcome. Magnetic resonance (MR) and microwave tomography (MT) are complementary and synergistic because the high resolution of MR is used to encode spatial priors on breast geometry and internal parenchymal features that have distinct electrical properties (i.e., fat vs fibroglandular tissue) for microwave tomography."

AAPM is the premier organization in medical physics, a broadly-based scientific and professional discipline encompassing physics principles and applications in biology and medicine. AAPM's mission is to advance the science, education and professional practice of medical physics