Giving Compass Take:

• According to Futurity, researchers have found a way to use light and sound imaging to help in ovarian cancer diagnosis, a notoriously difficult cancer to detect early.

•  How can funders help in the fight against ovarian cancer? Which treatments have proven the most effective?

•  Read more about the search for an ovarian cancer cure.

Ovarian cancer claims the lives of more than 14,000 women in the US each year, ranking fifth among cancer deaths in women.

Researchers recently conducted a pilot study using co-registered photoacoustic tomography with ultrasound to evaluate ovarian tumors in 16 patients. The findings appear in Radiology.

“When ovarian cancer is detected at an early, localized stage — stage 1 or 2 — the five-year survival rate after surgery and chemotherapy is 70 to 90 percent, compared with 20 percent or less when it is diagnosed at later stages, 3 or 4,” says Quing Zhu, professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis and of radiology.

“Clearly, early detection is critical, yet due the lack of effective screening tools only 20-25 percent of ovarian cancers are diagnosed early. If detected in later stages, the survival rate is very low,” Zhu says.

Read the full article about ovarian cancer research by Beth Miller at Futurity.