TUESDAY, Dec. 17, 2024 (HeathDay News) -- Pancreatic cancer can be a silent killer -- the organ is located deep inside the body, making cancer harder to detect before it becomes life-threatening.

A specific type of MRI scan, however, might help doctors better detect pancreatic cancer early, a new study finds.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is capable of detecting precancerous lesions in the pancreas, researchers reported Dec. 13 in the journal Investigative Radiology.

These results could open the way to early clinical diagnosis of people at risk of pancreatic cancer, researchers said.

“I believe this study represents a milestone in research into premalignant pancreatic cancer lesions,” said lead researcher Dr. Carlos Bilreiro, a radiologist with the Champalimaud Clinical Center in Portugal.

“We are now able to detect these lesions in animals and better understand how pancreatic cancer develops,” Bilreiro added in a center news release. “We also know that DTI is just as effective in the human pancreas.”

Pancreatic cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, researchers said in background notes.

When caught early, pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of 44%, but once it’s spread to other organs then five-year survival plummets to around 3%.

Unfortunately, pancreatic cancer symptoms are easily confused with those of other diseases -- unexplained weight loss, the onset of diabetes and jaundice among them.

About 95% of pancreatic cancers are a form of the disease called pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAC), and many of them develop from a precancerous lesion called pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PanIN), researchers explained.

These precancerous lesions aren’t easy to detect using normal scanning methods, but researchers thought that DTI might be able to highlight them.

“DTI is a method that relies on the diffusion of water molecules inside the tissues,” allowing radiologists to observe the microscopic structure of tissues, researcher Noam Shemesh, head of the Preclinical MRI lab at Champalimaud Research, said.

DTI was invented 30 years ago and is typically used for brain imaging.

“It's not a new method -- it was just never applied in the context of pancreatic cancer precursor lesions,” Shemesh noted.

In the study, researchers used DTI to accurately detect pancreatic lesions in lab mice.

Researchers took DTI images and then compared them to biopsy samples taken from the lab mice. They found the DTI images matched the pancreas lesions found in biopsy.

The team then imaged human tissue samples and found that DTI has the potential to efficiently and effectively detect pancreatic lesions in people.

“We obtained samples from patients and showed that our results generalize to humans,” Shemesh said. “We took parts of human pancreases and scanned them in the same way we did the mouse samples.”

However, more studies are needed to hone the technique before it might be used on people to help screen for pancreatic cancer, researchers concluded.

“Our work represents a proof of concept, and provides a basis to actually do a trial on humans, on patients with a method that is already basically implemented,” Shemesh added.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about pancreatic cancer.

SOURCE: Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, news release, Dec. 13, 2024