For people at high risk of breast cancer, getting a yearly mammogram might not be enough because cancer can grow between screenings. These interval cancers make up 20 to 30 percent of cases and are often more aggressive. Standard ultrasound machines make it overly complicated to get checked frequently because they are bulky and require trained experts.

An MIT team built a smaller, easier option. Lead researcher Canan Dagdeviren lost her aunt to interval breast cancer in 2015 and wanted a better way to check dense tissue frequently.

Smarter Breast Cancer Screening

breast cancer screening
The portable device eliminates the need for traditional, clunky breast cancer screening technology; Photo: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock

The team built a portable ultrasound system barely bigger than a smartphone. In a new study, they made the images much clearer by adding a “backing layer” to the probe to focus sound waves.

Former MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem explained, “With the backing layer, the device produces more accurate and sharper images, with a wider operating range of frequencies.”

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They also wrote an algorithm adjusting for how fast sound moves through skin and fat. “What we are trying to do is predict the speed of sound properties of the tissue you’re imaging, and then use that to reconstruct the image more accurately,” MIT graduate student Shrihari Viswanath said. “We see up to a 10 percent improvement in the resolution just by applying this technique.”

Doing It Yourself

This can help you even without medical training. A new screen interface shows exactly where to place the scanner. When tested on beginners using a gel material, the users easily found hidden targets.

“Conventionally, you need an operator to move the probe around the breast, but we made a computer-vision interface for users to do it by themselves,” MIT graduate student Hyeokjun Yoon added. “This is very user-friendly and it shows live images on the screen.”

This allows for long-term monitoring at a clinic or from the comfort of your own home. “At each time interval, the computer interface guides you to position the device in exactly the same location, which is important for the longitudinal monitoring of a given tissue,” Dagdeviren said. “It’s very intuitive and quite easy to use.”

The team hopes to connect future versions to cellphones and eventually start a company. Dagdeviren added, “The technology is so versatile that it can be used for any soft tissue imaging, from ovarian cancer to measuring endometriosis progression, or fetal monitoring.”