An Optoelectromechanical Tactile Sensor for Detection of Breast Lumps

Abstract

We developed a compact tactile imaging (TI) system to guide the clinician or the self-user for noninvasive detection of breast tumors. Our system measures the force distribution based on the difference in stiffness between a palpated object and an abnormality within. The average force resolution, force range, and the spatial resolution of the device are 0.02 N, 0-4 N, and 2.8 mm, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the proposed TI system, compression experiments were performed to measure the sensitivity and specificity of the system in detecting tumor-like inclusions embedded in tissue-like cylindrical silicon samples. Based on the experiments performed with 11 inclusions, having two different sizes and two different stiffnesses located at three different depths, our TI system showed an average sensitivity of 90.8 ± 8.1 percent and an average specificity of 89.8 ± 12.7 percent. 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.

Video-tactile pneumatic sensor for soft tissue elastic modulus estimation

“…In the past a number of devices to determine stiffness of soft tissue have been developed. Many approaches such as physical wave methods—magnetic resonance elastography [ 2 , 3 ] and ultrasound scans [ 4 , 5 ]—as well as sensor [ 6 ] for relative soft tissue compliance have been suggested. The main function of these devices is to find malignant inclusions within the soft tissues and define their size.…”

Design and fabrication of a robotic tactile device for abdominal palpation

“…In 2013, Ayyildiz et al, developed a tactile imaging system (TI) consisting of 100 sensors to measure the force distribution based on stiffness differences [19]. An array of optical elements consisting of an integrated IR emitting diode and a photo-darlington transistor were used as sensors.…”

Flexible Tactile Sensor Array for Slippage and Grooved Surface Recognition in Sliding Movement

“…(1) Using a tactile sensor array with high-density sensing units to measure the contact forces when it touches the object’s surface. Then the measured force values are plotted into a gray scale figure, which can be used to discriminate between the contour shapes of the objects using an image processing algorithm [19,20]. (2) Using a spectral analysis algorithm to analyze the measured forces when the tactile sensor slides along the surface of the objects.…”