Join Dr. Srivalleesha Mallidi as she discusses advances in pancreatic cancer therapies using ultrasound-guided photoacoustic imaging.
Pancreatic cancer is a disease with an incredibly poor survival rate. As only about 20% of patients are eligible for surgical resection, neoadjuvant treatments that can relieve symptoms and shrink tumors for surgical resection become critical. Many forms of treatments rely on increased vulnerability of cancerous cells, but tumors or regions within the tumors that may be hypoxic could be drug resistant. Particularly for neoadjuvant therapies such as the tyrosine kinase inhibitors utilized to shrink tumors, it is critical to monitor changes in vascular function and hypoxia to predict treatment efficacy.
Current clinical imaging modalities used to obtain structural and functional information regarding hypoxia or oxygen saturation (StO2) do not provide sufficient depth penetration or require the use of exogenous contrast agents. In the second episode of the Vevo 4 Oncology Web Series, Dr. Mallidi will discuss the use of ultrasound-guided photoacoustic imaging (US-PAI), which has recently garnered significant popularity as it can noninvasively provide multiparametric information on tumor vasculature and function without the need for contrast agents.
Presenters
Srivalleesha Mallidi
Srivalleesha (Valli) Mallidi obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from University of Texas at Austin. She worked in the Ultrasound imaging group of Prof. Stanislav Emelianov. Dr. Mallidi master’s thesis involved custom designing ultrasound based multi-modality imaging systems while her doctoral work explored the utility of surface plasmon resonance properties of spherical gold nanoparticles for early detection of cancer and probing nano-molecular interactions. Her graduate work is published in journals such as Nanoletters and Optics Express. Her work on Molecular specific photoacoustic imaging is highly cited.
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