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Optics Express, an open-access journal published by the Optical Society (OSA) publishes special focus issue highlighting lung cancer imaging research.

Advanced imaging technologies that promise to improve the development of effective drugs to treat lung cancer are the focus of the current special issue of Optics Express, an open-access journal published by the Optical Society (OSA). Research featured in the special focus issue on Imaging in Diagnosis and Treatment of Lung Cancer outlines standardized approaches to measure and compare tumor size, as well as to validate the accuracy of such measurements under defined settings. The appropriate validation of these tools is a critical new area of research as important new applications for these tools are being explored in pharmaceutical drug development.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death globally, according to the World Health Organization. Every year 1.3 million people die from the disease, and someone in the United States diagnosed with lung cancer today will typically have only a 15 percent chance of being alive five years from now.

Many lives can be saved thanks to modern medicine, but one of the critical issues for effective treatment is the ability of doctors to accurately image tumors in the lung. Before, during, and after treatment, radiologists scan the lungs and, depending on what these scans show, they diagnose the cancer and shape the treatment accordingly. The four research papers in the current issue of Optics Express, which are highlighted below, address issues that relate to the development of this new field of quantitative imaging within the challenging clinical problem of lung cancer therapeutics.

The use of precise quantitation tools may allow for more rapid evaluation of the success or failure of drug candidates in clinical trials. Regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) require consistent, objective performance for measurement tools. The open-source measurementCOMPUT tools described in Optics Express can be applied to analyze the growing number of new public data sets and develop computer algorithms that can automatically calculate the change in the 3-D volume of a tumor.

The research takes advantage of Interactive Science Publishing, a new paradigm for the publication of scientific images developed by OSA. This initiative, developed in partnership with the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and Kitware Inc., allows readers to view and interact with underlying 2-D and 3-D source data, such as CT scans . It expands upon traditional research by allowing scientists to objectively compare the performance of different technologies. To achieve this, ISP provides readers with a free 3-D visualization application that obtains images from a Web-based image archive called MIDAS.

The Optics Express focus issue on lung cancer imaging is part of an ongoing collaboration between OSA and the Prevent Cancer Foundation that has convened a series of workshops to accelerate progress in this area. The issue editors are James L. Mulshine, vice president for research at Rush University; Thomas M. Baer, executive director at the Stanford Photonics Research Center; and Rick Avila, senior director of healthcare solutions at Kitware, Inc. The special issue builds on background information on the application of image processing approaches in lung cancer drug development published in a previous OSA monograph called Quantitative Imaging Tools for Lung Cancer Drug Assessment.

Source: EurekAlert