The VIBRANT Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The eVaulation of sources of vIBRAtioN for vibrational shear wave elasTography
IRAS ID
331085
Contact name
Emma Harris
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The Institute of Cancer Research
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 17 days
Research summary
Patients suffering with Head and Neck Cancer often must wait 3 months or more to know if their treatment has been effective, which can be very stressful. We are developing an imaging tool that may be useful to help clinicians understand if patients need secondary treatment, surgery to remove lymph nodes in the neck, sooner. Evidence suggests that lymph nodes containing cancer are stiffer than normal lymph nodes.Our tool, vibrational shear wave elastography, measures the stiffness of tissue using shear waves. Gentle vibrations, like those of a mobile phone, applied to the skin surface can create shear waves in the body. We use ultrasound imaging and an algorithm we have developed to measure shear wave speed which is related to tissue stiffness. The algorithm is applied to ultrasound images using software we have written.
To develop the software we wish to explore different ways of creating shear waves in the neck and see how well we can detect shear waves as they pass through tissues such as muscle, the thyroid and other glands in the neck. Healthy volunteers will be recruited to participate. We will use external vibrational sources gently placed against the neck in different positions to understand what the best approach to achieve the best measurement of tissue stiffness is. We will also ask healthy volunteers to generate vibrations themselves using their vocal cords, a process called vocal fremitus. They will be asked utter ‘aaa’ sounds at different pitches, and we will image the shear wave generated by the vibrating vocal cords. We will also ask volunteers how comfortable they found the external vibrations and how easy or difficult they found it to utter and hold the sounds. This study is an exploratory benchmarking study of the software that will help us develop our technique further.
REC name
West Midlands - South Birmingham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
24/WM/0107
Date of REC Opinion
30 May 2024
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion