Prof. Mekhail Anwar and his team have published groundbreaking research in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems (TBioCAS) link, advancing the field of precision cancer surgery.
Curative treatment for cancer is often limited by what remains invisible. Tumors buried deep within lymph nodes can go undetected during surgery, leading to recurrence as metastases. High-energy gamma photons, coupled with radionuclides targeted to cancer cells, offer a way to image tumors deep in tissue beyond the limits of light.
The new research introduces a configurable, millimeter-scale, scintillator-free gamma photon spectrometer designed to detect microscopic cancer cells in real time during surgery. The study demonstrates how a single CMOS chiplet can achieve gamma sensing with precise energy resolution, a critical factor for reconstructing images of tumors located deep within tissue.
This milestone builds on the team’s prior advancements in chip-scale radiation sensing:
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VLSI 2024: Introduced low-flux detection with a chip-scale imager (Best Student Paper Award)
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JSSC 2025: Expanded gamma energy resolution capabilities
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ISSCC 2025: Developed new pixel architectures for improved energy resolution and detection efficiency
These innovations stem from earlier work detecting and quantifying high-LET charged particles, such as protons and electrons, used in cancer therapy.
Rahul Lall led this research, with collaborators Youngho Seo and Ali M. Niknejad contributing to the development of advanced chip-scale imaging technology for cancer detection.
Future work from the team will explore how this class of sensors can enable wearable SPECT systems for theranostic applications.
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