The OCTOPUS (Oncological Concurrent Tomographic Optoacoustics, Pet and
UltraSonography) project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement
no.101030046. This UCM-led project has been awarded to the researcher Dr. Mailyn Pérez-Liva
and has Prof. J. M Udías as supervising researcher, with the collaboration of prestigious
institutions such as the Centre de Recherches Cardiovasculaires de Paris, INSERM U970 (In vivo
Imaging lab of Prof. Bertrand Tavitian) and the Instituto de Tecnologías Físicas y de la
Información "Leonardo Torres Quevedo" (ITEFI) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas (CSIC) (Grupo de Sistemas y tecnologías ultrasónicas (GSTU) of researcher Jorge
Camacho). OCTOPUS aimed to create a new multimodal imaging tool to correlate molecular,
vascular and tissue oxygenation information, three of the main hallmarks of cancer, in a
longitudinal, simultaneous, quantitative, fully co-registered and in vivo manner. Because cancer
is a complex disease involving multiple hallmarks, many of the recently developed therapies,
described as precision medicine, target these hallmarks. Imaging techniques are crucial tools for
analysing the stage, characteristics, and relationship between several of these hallmarks.
However, until recently these analyses were performed from separate imaging modalities, taken
at different physiological states, making multiparametric correlation difficult. With the
OCTOPUS project will build the first in vivo and multimodal preclinical tool that investigates
simultaneously the interactions between tissue oxygenation by Multispectral Optoacoustic
Imaging, vascularization by Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging, and Metabolism, employing super-
resolved PET imaging. OCTOPUS will also provide a machine learning-based platform for
advanced multi-parametric analysis of all image-derived tissue features that can be extracted with
this equipment, in order to facilitate the interpretation of underlying intratumoural mechanisms
and ultimately guide the design or tailoring of targeted therapies.
