Abstract
This paper presents new findings concerning a hand-held stiffness probe for the medical diagnosis of abnormalities during palpation of soft-tissue. Palpation is recognized by the medical community as an essential and low-cost method to detect and diagnose disease in soft-tissue. However, differences are often subtle and clinicians need to train for many years before they can conduct a reliable diagnosis. The probe presented here fills this gap providing a means to easily obtain stiffness values of soft tissue during a palpation procedure. Our stiffness sensor is equipped with a multi degree of freedom (DoF) Aurora magnetic tracker, allowing us to track and record the 3D position of the probe whilst examining a tissue area, and generate a 3D stiffness map in real-time. The stiffness probe was integrated in a robotic arm and tested in an artificial environment representing a good model of soft tissue organs; the results show that the sensor can accurately measure and map the stiffness of a silicon phantom embedded with areas of varying stiffness.
Highlights
Palpation is frequently used in medical practice and plays an important role in physical diagnosis [1]
Different experiments were carried out to analyse the performance of the proposed stiffness probe
Manual palpation of silicone phantoms was performed to evaluate the ability of the sensor in distinguishing materials that present different stiffness and study the effect of the probe’s orientation on the the computation of the stiffness of the probed material
Summary
Palpation is frequently used in medical practice and plays an important role in physical diagnosis [1]. Changes in tissue stiffness may be an indication that cancer is present and one of the points of interest within the robotics and haptics research community has been the development of methods for tissue elasticity measurement. Indentation systems employ an indenter, which is used to compress the soft tissue, and sensing technologies that are used to compute the reaction force and the indentation depth. Combining the indentation depth and the reaction force the soft tissue stiffness can be estimated [7]. Linear elastic modelling of soft tissues is the most widely used approach [11] This model assumes that the tissue obeys the generalized Hooke’s law; to springs, it is able to resume its configuration after the application of a force. Fung et al [12]
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