An optoacoustic imaging feature set to characterise blood vessels surrounding benign and malignant breast lesions.

Combining optoacoustic (OA) imaging with ultrasound (US) enables visualisation of functional blood vasculature in breast lesions by OA to be overlaid with the morphological information of US. Here, we develop a simple OA feature set to differentiate benign and malignant breast lesions. 94 female patients with benign, indeterminate or suspicious lesions were recruited and underwent OA-US. An OA-US imaging feature set was developed using images from the first 38 patients, which contained 14 malignant and 8 benign solid lesions. Two independent radiologists blindly scored the OA-US images of a further 56 patients, which included 31 malignant and 13 benign solid lesions, with a sensitivity of 96.8% and specificity of 84.6%. Our findings indicate that OA-US can reveal vascular patterns of breast lesions that indicate malignancy using a simple feature set based on single wavelength OA data, which is therefore amenable to application in low resource settings for breast cancer management.

Dispersal and Infectivity of the Entomogenous Nematode, Neoaplectana carpocapsae Weiser (Rhabditida: Steinernematidae), in Sand.

Laboratory tests determined the lateral and vertical dispersal patterns of Neoaplectana carpocapsae in sand. In the vertical tests, placement of infective juveniles 15 cm below the sand's surface resulted in the majority (77%) being recovered above the point of placement after 48 h. Placement of the nematodes on the sand's surface resulted in the majority (90.4%) remaining within 1 cm of the sand's surface. Placement of nematodes at depths of 2.5 cm and 5.0 cm below the sand's surface also resulted in little nematode dispersal. However, vertical hioassay tests showed that juvenile nematodes placed on the sand's surface dispersed 12 cm down to infect 67% of the Galleria mellonella pupae placed at the depth. Conversely, when nematodes were placed 11 cm below the insect pupae no infection was observed, but 53% infection occurred when nematodes were 7 cm below the site of the insect pupae. In lateral dispersal, 87% of the nematodes rentained within 2 cm of the placement site, although 0.5% were recovered at 12-14 cm away from the point of placement. Lateral bioassay tests indicated that the nematodes were capable of infecting 90, 35, and 5% of the G. mellonella pupae at 7 cm, 10 cm, and 14 cm from the point of placement, respectively.