In collaboration with Dr. Stephen Grobmyer, MD of the department of Surgery at the College of Medicine and Dr. Huikai Xie, PhD of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in this project Dr. Huabei Jiang and his students will develop a novel photoacoustic molecular imaging approach that combines tumor targeted imaging probes with advanced microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based photoacoustic imaging instrumentation for detecting breast cancer and for outlining the tumor border during breast conserving cancer surgery. In this study, urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR) targeted near infrared (NIR) dye-labeled nanoparticles will be used to deliver the imaging probes into breast tumors. The location and depth of the tumors will be detected using photoacoustic tomography.