QT Imaging Holdings has secured a third-year renewal of its five-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The study is a collaboration with the Department of Radiation Oncology, the Radiation Treatment Program at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Grainger College of Engineering.
The project's goal is to develop an accurate, quantitative, portable, safe, and repeatable breast imaging approach for early identification of the response of breast cancer patients to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. As part of this grant, the QTI Breast Acoustic CT System installed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center earlier in 2024 collected high-resolution breast images from female patients with independent cancer biomarkers. Researchers tested the backscatter analysis method on in vivo breast imaging data.
The team will next incorporate the algorithms into the QTI image reconstruction flow through combined algorithms and apply AI and machine-learning techniques to yield an improved estimate of chemotherapy efficacy based on the quantitative biomarkers from QTI scan data and backscatter analysis.
![A normal mammogram confirmed by three-year radiologic follow-up illustrates reader-marked regions of interest (ROIs) during (A) unaided (round 1) and (B) artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted (round 2) reading. Each colored dot represents an ROI for recall by a human reader. Readers could mark more than one ROI per case, represented by multiple dots of the same color. During AI-assisted reading, the AI system displayed three visible prompts: two with suspicion of malignancy scores of 35% (left mediolateral oblique [L MLO] and craniocaudal [L CC]) and one with a suspicion of malignancy score of 10% (right craniocaudal [R CC]), shown as polygonal overlays. Without AI, six of 10 readers (60%) marked a false-positive ROI. With AI assistance, this fell to two of 10 (20%). R MLO = right mediolateral oblique.](https://img.auntminnie.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/07/2026-07-14-radiology-mammogram-ai-auto-bias.H0bYO8QlWs.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
