New imaging device takes winning image

The winners of the 2014 Extreme Imaging Competition have been announced.

The winning image for this year’s Extreme Imaging Competition involved an optic probe that could be inserted inside a needle to visualise breast cancer within the body.

Taken by Loretta Scolaro from the University of Western Australia,  who was supervised by Professor David Sampson, the image is the result of a new imaging device the researchers developed to improve intra-operative cancer detection. 

Scolaro and her team wanted to image cancer in a way which allowed them to see its boundaries while it was still in the body, allowing for better outcomes from surgery. They opted to use optical coherence tomography (OCT) - a relatively new technique which is analogous to ultrasound, easy and fairly inexpensive, but can only see 1 to 2 mm in depth.

The researchers thus looked to developing an optic probe that could be inserted inside a needle and delivered to the site of the cancer inside the body. Scolaro said the needle, probe and accompanying lenses and mirror had to be “small, to be minimally invasive; robust, to be used during surgery; and easy to manufacture”. The final needle was just over half a millimetre in width.

The runner-up was Paul Stewart, of the University of Sydney, supervised by Dr Peter Tuthill. Stewart said that his project turns “the rings of Saturn into a giant telescope”.

He explained that the NASA spacecraft Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for around 10 years, and the craft will “watch a star as it passes behind the rings with a spectrograph”. As a star passes behind the planet’s rings, its light source is diffracted around the rings’ edges, because they are so sharp. “Each edge within the rings will actually give you a slice through the star in a different direction normal to the edge at that point,” explained Stewart.

“Once you have the brightness profiles from each direction, you can actually project them over each other in the same way that is done in medical tomography, and then apply regression algorithms which will take out a lot of the artefacts and essentially reduce the complexity of the image to get you an image that’s closest to what the true image of the star would be.”

Winner of the undergraduate prize was Charles Baker from The University of Queensland, supervised by Dr Nicholas Dowson, Dr Paul Thomas and Professor Steven Rose. Baker has developed a kinetic model to image liver lesions that takes into account the structural and functional features of the liver.

Baker explained that during a PET (positron emission tomography) scan, the regions of the body are imaged as a collection of 3D cubes. For about an hour, the patient has to lie motionless while the PET scanner fires up a number of images, eventually generating a static PET image.

“Having a patient in a PET scanner for 60 to 75 minutes is not easy to do,” Baker noted. The project thus had several aims, he said: to image smaller lesions; to determine the bioactive areas of larger lesions; to reduce nuclear medicine reporting time; and to reduce the total scan time.

CiSRA R&D Manager Roger Butler said that the competition entries get stronger every year. Among those entrants which didn’t reach the finals, he listed technology for detecting smoke in video footage; a terahertz lens capable of propagating sub-wavelengths over long distances; and a high-speed camera, attached to an X-ray synchrotron, which captured images of lung tissue.

“I’d like to thank and congratulate the students and their supervisors who entered the competition, not just the finalists but all of them; they were all really good quality, and separating them was quite difficult,” Butler said. “We were pleased to receive a very interesting and diverse range of quality applications; the judging really was a delight as well as a challenge.”

Scolaro said it was “fantastic” just to be a part of the awards night, and “just to see the quality of research in other fields has been a privilege”.

Now in its third year, the annual imaging competition is held by Canon Australia’s local research and development arm, Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CiSRA). It is open to all Australian university students who are developing a new technique or equipment which produces images as part of their research project