D24AC00296

The use of surgical pathology to ensure negative tumor margins is limited in many settings including in the rural United States and in low and middle income countries due to a lack of infrastructure and human resources.

To address this need we will develop and validate AccessPath, an affordable end to end system for immediate digital pathology of resected tumors.

AccessPath will automatically and rapidly identify regions of a resected tumor with positive margins and communicate their location to the surgeon.

AccessPath integrates three innovations:

1. A novel low cost (less than $10,000) high resolution large field of view microscope with extended depth of field.

2. An innovative strategy to optimize fluorescent dyes to rapidly stain resected tumor and target cellular architectural features to differentiate tumors from normal and benign tissue.

3. A novel machine learning framework and classification algorithm to classify images of fresh stained tissue margins as positive or negative and report the location of positive margins.

By cutting costs of pathology equipment by at least 40 fold and eliminating the need for expert pathologists, AccessPath will make point of care surgical guidance accessible to all hospitals.

AccessPath has the potential to work for all types of solid tumors.

Here we demonstrate its ability to reduce rates of positive margins in surgeries for two types of cancers: breast and head & neck.

In this five year project we will solve key technical challenges to provide immediate margin assessment of resected tumors up to 10x10x10 cm in size within 15 minutes, including:

1. Novel array microscope design and manufacturing strategies to produce high performance low cost UV illumination optics and objective lenses to construct an affordable rugged array microscope with extended depth of field.

2. Click chemistry to create a set of bright inexpensive vital fluorescent stains that target key cellular and extracellular markers of cancers.

3. Fast and accurate AI algorithms to generate virtual H&E staining and automatically identify positive margins from images collected with AccessPath.

AccessPath will provide rapid automated tumor margin assessment.

The cost to build an AccessPath system is less than $10,000 at low production volume.

The only consumables required are vital dyes ($0.50 per use) to quickly stain resected tissue to highlight features that differentiate tumor from normal benign tissue.

Because of its low cost, high speed, and automated analysis, AccessPath can revolutionize real time surgical guidance in low resource settings in the US and worldwide, greatly expanding the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intra-operative tumor margin assessment and improving outcomes for all cancer patients treated with surgery.

William Marsh Rice University

THE FOUR INITIAL FOCUS AREAS ARE(1) HEALTH SCIENCE FUTURES(2) SCALABLE SOLUTIONS(3) PROACTIVE HEALTH(4) RESILIENT SYSTEMS

93.384 - ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY for HEALTH (ARPA-H)

Interior Business Center (IBC) [DOI]

Harris, Texas United States

County-Wide

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