Tag: cancer diagnosis

IMPACT: Upgrade at PSI research facility approved

IMPACT: Upgrade at PSI research facility approved

Green light for IMPACT: The upgrade at the proton accelerator facility at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI planned for the coming years will be implemented. Funding for this two-part enhancement was assured within the framework of the ERI Dispatch 2025-2028.

Financing of the Swiss Dispatch on promotion of Education, Research, and Innovation (ERI) in the years 2025 through 2028 was approved in mid-December 2024 in the Swiss Parliament. This means the budget that the ETH Domain is to receive for the coming years has been approved. This budget includes 50 million Swiss francs with which the ETH Council will co-finance the IMPACT project from central funds in the period 2025-2028. The upgrade to the user facilities associated with the proton accelerator at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI can thus be realised.

IMPACT is a joint project of PSI, the University of Zurich, and the University Hospital of Zurich. It comprises two significant upgrades to PSI’s research facilities: 

First, under the name HIMB, two beamlines for experiments with muons will be significantly improved. Muons are secondary particles generated by the protons. HIMB will increase by a factor of 100 the number of muons used for research purposes, for example in physics and materials science.

Second, a new facility called TATTOOS will be built, where important radionuclides can be produced. Radionuclides are used to produce radiopharmaceuticals, which in turn are used to diagnose and treat cancer.

“We are very pleased that funding for IMPACT has been approved as part of the ERI dispatch,” says PSI Director Christian Rüegg. “We are proud and grateful that we can continue to invest in the future. Education and research secure the prosperity and independence of Switzerland,” continues Rüegg. “Especially in financially difficult times, we therefore need strong research and innovation and strategic, forward-looking investments. IMPACT is an important step for the future of materials research, medicine and particle physics.”

Read more on the PSI website

Image: PSI Director Christian Rüegg at the cover of the cyclotron, which represents the third acceleration stage for the proton beam at PSI, which is unique worldwide.

Credit: © Scanderbeg Sauer Photography

New method of data quality improvement by noise removal

New method of data quality improvement by noise removal

Scientists from the CIRI beamline have found a way to accelerate infrared imaging of biological tissues. Their solution will enable faster diagnosis of cancer thanks to denoising. You can read about the MNF2 method they developed in the journal “Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory System”. With this discovery, researchers significantly enhanced the measurement capabilities using the FPA array detector available at the FT-IR microscopy end station at the CIRI beamline.

In infrared imaging (IR), a key aspect of the analysis of biological tissues is the time necessary to perform the measurement. This is particularly important in terms of the diagnosis of tumors in tissues – where it can be used as an alternative to conventional histopathological staining as well as support for histopathologists in the diagnosis of the disease. One of the approaches to shorten the measurement time is to reduce the number of measured scans to, e.g. 4 – which are employed in studies on tissue classification – instead of the typically measured 128 or 64 scans. This results in increased noise in the spectra. However, by using data pre-processing methods, specifically denoising, they can obtain data qualitatively comparable to those measured with a large number of scans. Nowadays, the method gaining popularity among researchers working with IR imaging is the Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF) method. This method is based on the eigenvalue decomposition. In the first step: the noise matrix is calculated and decomposed. This estimate is made by subtracting the signal from neighboring pixels, assuming that they do not differ in terms of chemical composition – the only difference should be noise.

Read more on the SOLARIS website

Image: On the left side, a breast needle biopsy imaged with FT-IR is presented, with three interesting tissue regions: necrosis, blood, and fiber. On the right side,  FT-IR spectra are shown (coming from pixels marked with filled squares), for visual comparison of denoising methods performance.