Previous research has shown that ovarian cancer has already metastasized in up to 75% of women before the cancer is diagnosed. Because the main challenge in detecting ovarian cancer metastases is their property of random distribution in the abdomen, researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) developed a tumor-sensitive matching-flow technique that searches all areas surrounding the liver and the spleen, said presenter Dr. Jianfei Liu, PhD, of the NIH.
The method compares patient images against an atlas from healthy individuals, locating metastases by measuring the comparison difference, he said. In a study of 17 patients receiving contrast-enhanced CT screening, the method yielded sensitivity of 82.4% with a false-positive rate of 1.2 per patient.
"These promising results show that our method can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of ovarian cancer metastasis detection," Liu said.
