Rayleigh Damping Modelling to Assess Viscous Behaviour in Actuated Breast Tissue

Abstract

Breast cancer is a significant health problem worldwide. Emerging non-invasive methods assess tumor presence by its impact on breast tissue mechanics. This paper outlines a method to identify equivalent viscous damping in breast tissue and fit a model based on the Rayleigh damping (RD) model. Surface motion information of actuated breast tissue was captured using the Digital Image Elasto Tomography (DIET) system. The viscous damping was calculated for over 14,000 reference points using an ellipse fitted to the force-displacement hysteresis loop response data to calculate work done. A damping model based on RD is suggested and fit to median filtered data of viscous damping constant plotted against the major ellipse axis. This successfully described the trend for all 29 breasts (14 cancerous, 15 healthy) with average R2 values ranging from 0.79-0.88. One model coefficient, ‘a’, proportional to local mass, showed reasonable consistency among the subjects and decreased with increasing frequency. No significant difference in this ‘a’ coefficient between healthy and cancerous breasts showed indication of diagnostic potential. However, consistent values across all breasts suggest it is a fundamental tissue property. Further suggestions to normalise the major axis by frequency demonstrate the potential for the model to be developed to describe viscous behaviour of breast tissue in the form of storage and loss modulus.