Tag Archives: virtual

Modeling tumor dormancy: What makes a tumor switch from dormant to malignant?

A new computational model developed in the laboratory of Salvatore Torquato, a Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, may help illuminate the conditions surrounding tumor dormancy and the switch to a malignant state. Published today in PLOS ONE, the so-called cellular automaton model simulated various scenarios of tumor growth leading to tumor suppression, dormancy or proliferation. “The power of the model is that it lets people to test medically realistic scenarios,” Torquato said. In future collaborations, these scenarios could be engineered in laboratory experiments and the observed outcomes could be used to calibrate the model. …

‘Virtual breast’ could improve cancer detection

That results in lots of needless worry for women and their families — not to mention the time, discomfort and expense of additional tests, including ultrasounds and biopsies. Recently, a different type of test, ultrasound elastography, has been used to pinpoint possible tumors throughout the body, including in the breast. “It uses imaging to measure the stiffness of tissue, and cancer tissues are stiff,” says Jingfeng Jiang, a biomedical engineer at Michigan Technological University. Those images can be breathtakingly clear: Jiang shows one elastogram in which the tumor is as different from normal breast tissue as a yolk is from the white in a fried egg. …