DIY Cancer Test: Cancer Scare Pushed GE Physicist to Develop Her Own Screening Method

It was a moment that many of us fear. A few years ago Ileana Hancu went for a routine physical exam and came back with troubling news. Her doctor thought that she felt a lump in her breast. What followed was an odyssey through the achievements of modern medicine, from mammography, to ultrasound and near biopsy. “But then the biopsy doctor decided that he could not see anything that he could biopsy,” Hancu says. She went for yet another test, an MRI exam, which gave her doctor enough information to conclude that no further screening was necessary. “In my case it was nothing, it was just a scare that took a month,” Hancu says. “But it made me realize that the way things are right now, even though we have so many imaging tools, we are not as good as we could be.”

Hancu, who is a physicist by training and MRI researcher at GE Global Research (GRC), couldn’t let her experience go. She went into her lab and designed an imaging solution that could one day save women like her from a similar ordeal. “I want the doctor to be able to look at all the images from an examination, and know for sure that everything is all right, or whether there is cancer,” she says. "Nobody needs or wants uncertainty at the end of a test."

Quality Control: “I measure success by making an impact on somebody’s life,” says Ileana Hancu.

Hancu’s research could be a boon for women in groups for whom mammograms can often be inconclusive, such as those with dense breasts. Her goal is to help eliminate the uncertainties when this group is screened. “You want to find out the answer about the positive or negative at that moment in time,” she says.

Hancu grew up in Bucharest, Romania, in a scientific family. Her father was a computer programmer, her mother was chemist, and Hancu enrolled at the university to study optics. “There probably wasn’t a single MRI machine in the whole country at that point in time,” she laughs. After graduation in 1996, she moved to study physics the University of Pittsburgh and discovered magnetic resonance. A few years later, she had a doctorate in the esoteric field. “That’s why I ended up at the GRC,” she says. “There are few places in the world that could use that kind of expertise.”

Hancu was in the middle of MRI research when her cancer scare struck. MRI had been used in the clinic for breast cancer diagnosis, but standard MRI images produced too many false positives, or lesions, which turned out to be benign at biopsy.

A new MRI-based method meant to clarify the picture, called diffusion-weighted imaging, has “bounced around the literature for the past few years,” Hancu says. “But the diffusion-weighted images were kind of lousy,” she says. They were like a screenshot from a TV with a bad antenna, fuzzy and distorted. A doctor could not truly read them and use them to decide the fate of a patient.

Hancu has started experimenting with methods that would increase the MRI signal and the spatial resolution of the images so that she could see even smaller tumors. One of her approaches involves building the MRI equivalent of a high-resolution camera.

The research work has already earned Hancu and her collaborator, Prof. Robert Lenkinski from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. They plan to test their technology on patients in a clinical trial to help further evaluate its use in breast cancer diagnosis.

Hancu says that learning is not an academic exercise for her. “If you end up developing an imaging technique that will help save people from having biopsies, if you can develop a technique that can tell you with certitude whether you have cancer or not, I think that’s the final measure of success,” Hancu says.

“I measure success by making an impact on somebody’s life.”