Viscous Damping in Actuated Breast Tissue to Detect Tumors in a Digital Image Elasto Tomography (DIET) System

摘要

This study develops a method to identify equivalent viscous damping for breast cancer diagnosis in a Digital Image Elasto Tomography (DIET) system. Displacement data of over 14,000 reference points on the breast surface of 7 breasts (4 cancerous and 3 healthy) from 4 patients were captured using the DIET system. An ellipse fit was utilized to calculate the work done and consequent viscous damping constant for each reference point. The gradient of the empirical cumulative distribution (CDF) of the viscous damping for each breast was calculated to detect and localize tumor segments by CDF variability. The gradient of the empirical cumulative distribution exhibited a flatter section early on in the tumor segments followed by a rise in gradient when compared with healthy tissue. A gradient ratio was defined to quantify this hypothesis, with good proof of concept accuracy for diagnosis and location of the tumor matching original mammography report. The overall results show the potential of identifying viscous damping for breast cancer diagnostics in a DIET system.