URMC radiologist Vikram Dogra and Navalgund Rao, a physicist at RIT, received a patent earlier this year for the new technology, called photoacoustic imaging. Their system uses rapid bursts of laser light to bombard a specific region of the body, with the resulting sound waves captured to create a series of high resolution images. The technique has several potential applications, but Rao and Dogra have focused on detecting prostate cancer because of its potential to make a significant impact.

According to the American Cancer Society, 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and nearly 30,000 men in the United States will die from the disease this year.

Men are routinely screened with a digital rectal exam or a blood test to check for prostate specific antigens (PSA). If the screening raises an alarm, a patient will receive an ultrasound or biopsy.

Dogra, whose specialty is diagnostic radiology, said that the effectiveness of these traditional techniques is limited. Almost half of PSA screened patients get a false-positive from the ultrasound, and biopsies miss about 30 percent of cancer cases.

“We can use ultrasound or even MRI, but we simply can’t see the prostate very well,” Dogra explained. “When we go to biopsy, we’re often not seeing where the cancer is. We take six samples from each side, but we still might not find the cancer.

“That’s the beauty of what we are trying to do,” Dogra said. “This new technology will most likely eliminate the need for doing biopsies completely, or at least allow us to do only a targeted biopsy.” (more)http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20130829/BUSINESS0110/308290016/sean-lahman-prostrate-cancer?nclick_check=1