Tactile, Orientation, and Optical Sensor Fusion for Tactile Breast Image Mosaicking

Breast cancer screening using tactile imaging (TI) is an advancing field of low-cost noninvasive medical imaging. Utilizing arrays capacitive pressure transducers to perform a differential stress measurement suspicious tissue, TI has been shown be effective in measuring lesion size and stiffness, subsequent differentiation malignant benign conditions, repeated clinical studies. In order further improve the classification accuracy TI, this article presents novel method mosaicking images form large composite map vein structure within breast spatially register data. This demonstrates practical nonrigid image mosaicking, probe contact force relative orientation sensor fusion correct for tissue deformation during scanning, miniaturized applied pre-clinical prototype. Testing proposed prototype on representative, tissue-mimicking, silicone phantoms, with varying baseline elasticity internal structure, yields typical registration accuracies 0.33% ± 0.15%. similar testing, system measures background samples worst case error < 4.5% over range 9–60 kPa, required accurate characterization. work will lead into validation situ phantom lesions, utilizing delivered metrics from accuracy.