# ACADEMIC-INDUSTRIAL PARTNERSHIP FOR TRANSLATION OF PET/TRUS GUIDED INTERVENTION

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS DALLAS · 2020 · $502,807

## Abstract

The central objective of this partnership between Emory and Eigen is to translate our PET/ultrasound fusion
targeted biopsy technology into a commercially supported platform for improving the detection of prostate
cancer. It has been reported that the long-term prostate cancer specific survival of patients initially managed
with active surveillance (AS) or watchful waiting for low-risk prostate cancer ranges from 97% to 100%.
However, among all men with indolent prostate cancer, the rate of aggressive treatment is as high as 64.3%.
The costs for the treatment are $12 billion each year in the USA. One reason for aggressive treatment is due
to the fact that the current standard diagnosis with transrectal ultrasound guided biopsy can miss up to 30%
of cancers. A major concern for active surveillance is the risk of high-grade cancer that may be missed by the
current diagnosis. There are unmet clinical needs to develop innovative imaging technology that can improve
the detection rate and distinguish aggressive cancer, which requires treatment, from the non-aggressive
disease, which can be well-managed with active surveillance.
 PET with new molecular imaging tracers has shown promising results for the detection of prostate cancer.
For example, 68Ga-PSMA PET can detect lesions characteristic for prostate cancer at low prostate specific
antigen level. In our preliminary study, 18F-FACBC PET showed higher focal uptake in tumor foci than in
normal prostate; and the standard uptake value of FACBC significantly correlated with Gleason score. Hence,
PET molecular information is useful to identify and target the suspicious high-risk cancer lesions for biopsy. For
this purpose, we built a PET/ultrasound fusion targeted biopsy system that is able to obtain 3D ultrasound data
and fuse them with PET/CT images. As a result, a suspicious PET lesion is superimposed over the ultrasound
data; and the fused image is then used to direct biopsy needles to targets. The PET/ultrasound targeted biopsy
technology can be used to identify those AS patients who have high-risk cancers but are missed by standard
TRUS-guided biopsy. We hypothesize that PET/ultrasound fusion targeted biopsy can detect more clinically
significant cancers than the standard transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) guided biopsy in AS patients. This
partnership will focus on the technology development and translation. Advanced learning-based segmentation
and deformable registration methods will be developed and integrated into Eigen's Artemis and ProFuse
systems. The PET/ultrasound targeted biopsy system will be tested with two new PET tracers in AS patients.
The approach will be applicable to any other PET probe. With this device, histology will be correlated with
molecular image characteristics, which may correlate to low vs high risk, at a high degree of certainty. The new
PET/ultrasound fusion method can be readily disseminated to our 55 existing sites. The technology will
provide clinicians a new imaging too...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9828774
- **Project number:** 5R01CA204254-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS DALLAS
- **Principal Investigator:** BAOWEI FEI
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $502,807
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-12-08 → 2021-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9828774

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9828774, ACADEMIC-INDUSTRIAL PARTNERSHIP FOR TRANSLATION OF PET/TRUS GUIDED INTERVENTION (5R01CA204254-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9828774. Licensed CC0.

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