Early cancer detection through metabolic measurement
Level - UndergradYour team of biomedical engineers works for a major cancer research center. One of the thrust areas for the center is the identification of better non-invasive techniques for the early detection of cancer. The center has a major project ongoing investigating effectiveness of using of whole-body FDG Positron Emission Tomography (PET) as a screening technique for the detection of pancreatic, liver, and kidney cancer. One of the major challenges for this project is to develop the means to quantitatively differentiate normal metabolic activity from elevated metabolic activity which is often associated with cancerous cells.
To date the project investigators have assumed that all healthy cells in the body: (1) consume glucose at a rate of 4.8 x 10-6 mg/s/mL of cell volume1, (2) have a diffusion coefficient of glucose across the cell membrane of 0.4 x 10-16 cm2/s, (3) have 10-nm thick membranes, and (4) have extracellular glucose concentrations of 1 mg/mL. The project director believes that inaccuracies in above assumptions may result in healthy cells being confused with cancerous cells thus leading to an unacceptably high false positive rate for this screening technique. Your team has been given the task of developing a model that establish a quantitative relationship between the rate of FDG transport across the cell membrane by healthy cells and: (a) cell size, (b) cell type, (c) membrane thickness, and (d) diffusion coefficient of FDG across the cell membrane.