Scientist Canan Dağdeviren and her team have made a groundbreaking advancement with the development of a new device that can be incorporated into a bra, facilitating early detection of breast cancer. The inspiration behind this remarkable project stems from her late aunt, who tragically lost her life to breast cancer.
Canan Dagdeviren has committed her professional journey to developing devices capable of gathering data from various parts of the human body. These inventions include an electrode designed to read brain signals in Parkinson’s patients, a tattoo-like patch for detecting skin cancer, and most recently, a bra equipped with a flexible ultrasound system, potentially enabling more comfortable breast cancer screening.
In a significant step forward, Dagdeviren and her team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have recently published research on the ultrasound device, intending to establish a company based on this technology. This marks the first instance where the professor is venturing beyond the laboratory setting, aiming to directly benefit patients with her innovations.
“I’m hoping to really make it real, and to touch people’s lives,” Dagdeviren said. “I want to see the impact of my technology not only in the lab, but on society.”
When breast cancer is diagnosed in the earliest stages, the survival rate is nearly 100 percent. However, for tumors detected in later stages, that rate drops to around 25 percent.
MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound device that could allow people to detect tumors when they are still in early stages. In particular, it could be valuable for patients at high risk of developing breast cancer in between routine mammograms.
The device is a flexible patch that can be attached to a bra, allowing the wearer to move an ultrasound tracker along the patch and image the breast tissue from different angles. In the new study, the researchers showed that they could obtain ultrasound images with resolution comparable to that of the ultrasound probes used in medical imaging centers.
She drew inspiration from her late aunt
For this project, Dagdeviren drew inspiration from her late aunt, Fatma Caliskanoglu, who was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer at age 49, despite having regular cancer screens, and passed away six months later. At her aunt’s bedside, Dagdeviren, then a postdoc at MIT, drew up a rough schematic of a diagnostic device that could be incorporated into a bra and would allow for more frequent screening of individuals at high risk for breast cancer.
“My goal is to target the people who are most likely to develop interval cancer,” says Dagdeviren, whose research group specializes in developing wearable electronic devices that conform to the body. “With more frequent screening, our goal to increase the survival rate to up to 98 percent.”
“Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, and it is treatable when detected early,” says Tolga Ozmen, a breast cancer surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who is also an author of the study. “One of the main obstacles in imaging and early detection is the commute that the women have to make to an imaging center. This conformable ultrasound patch is a highly promising technology as it eliminates the need for women to travel to an imaging center.”