Meme kanserinin görüntülenmesi için yeni bir opto-elektro-mekanik dokunsal sensör

We developed a compact Tactile Imaging (TI) system in order to guide the clinician or the self-user for non-invasive detection of breast lumps. Our TI system consists of 10×10 infrared emitter-detector sensors, a silicon-rubber elastic pad, and a contoured tactile interface (25x21 moving pins) for palpating breast tissue. The proposed TI system is more cost-effective than the conventional imaging techniques such as mammography, MRI, and ultrasonography. Furthermore, it has no side effects during or after the breast examination and can be used by women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Compared to the other TI systems utilizing capacitive or piezo-based sensing technologies, the proposed system conforms to the palpable object, which results in distributed force sensing and leads to higher spatial resolution. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed TI system, tissue-like cylindrical silicon samples containing tumor-like inclusions were prepared first. Then, compression experiments were performed with the TI system to measure its sensitivity and specificity in detecting those inclusions. Based on the experiments performed with 11 inclusions, having 2 different sizes and 2 different stiffnesses, located at 3 different depths, our TI system showed an average sensitivity of 90.82 ± 8.08%, an average specificity of 89.80 ± 12.66%. Finally, manual palpation experiments were performed with 12 human subjects on the same silicon samples and the results were compared to that of the TI system. The performance of the TI system was significantly better than that of the human subjects in detecting deep inclusions while the human subjects performed slightly better in detecting shallow inclusions close to the contact surface.