University of Houston

Breast conserving therapy (BCT) consists on a complete surgical excision of the tumor (partial mastectomy) followed by a post-operative radiotherapy to the remaining breast tissue. BCT is feasible for most women undergoing treatment for breast cancer. The goal of BCT is to achieve local control of the cancer as well as to preserve a breast that satisfies the woman&aposs cosmetic concerns. Unfortunately in many patients the remaining breast is left with major defects. The objective of our team is to provide a simulation tool that can predict the shape of the breast after this treatment and scale it in clinical conditions. This is a highly interdisciplinary effort led by Barbara Bass MD from the Methodist hospital and Marc Garbey from the University of Houston. A multiscale computational framework has been developed by our team; it needs to be validated and calibrated. The goal of this work is to design a pilot study with patients who are eligible to BCT and enrolled at the Methodist hospital. This is a very challenging problem that involves a broad spectrum of difficulties: from the design of the protocol that get the Institutional Review Board approval to the construction of a 3D imaging reconstruction system, and from the image analysis of noisy ultrasound images to the assimilation of medical images into the computational framework. We will discuss each elements of that work in this master thesis and start our construction from a review of the Quality of Life (QoL) literature on BCT.