Cervical lymph nodes are common sites of metastatic involvement in head and neck cancers. These lymph nodes are superficially located and palpation is a common practice for assessing nodal hardness and staging cancer which is, however, too subjective and with limited accuracy. In this study, the mechanical properties of pig lymph node tissues were investigated using ultrasound elastography and ...

In both photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasonic (US) imaging, overall image quality is influenced by the optical and acoustical properties of the medium. Consequently, with the increased use of combined PA and US (PAUS) imaging in preclinical and clinical applications, the ability to provide phantoms that are capable of mimicking desired properties of soft tissues is critical. To this end, gelatin-ba...

Ever since their inception, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE), the American Thyroid Association (ATA), and the Endo-Society ultrasound courses use turkey breasts as a media for demonstrating ultrasoundguided thyroid fine-needle aspiration (FNA). Animal tissue is used in other subspecialties for breast biopsy training (1,2). Currently, there is no cost-efficient neck m...

PURPOSE During gynecologic brachytherapy (BT), suturing and image-guided needle insertions are highly skill-dependent tasks. Medical residents often have to practice these techniques in the operating room; this is sub-optimal for many reasons. We present a fast and low-cost method of building realistic and disposable gynecologic phantoms, which can be used to train physicians new to gynecologic...

It would be useful to develop a tissue equivalent gel to improve the uniformity of the electromagnetic field in the human body, and for making a tissue equivalent dielectric human phantom. In this study, solid type, water based gelatin-honey gels were developed which have the electrical characteristics of skin tissue. It was demonstrated that a stable and homogeneous gel, with a relative dielec...

Five 9 cm x 9 cm x 9 cm phantoms, each with a 2-cm-diameter cylindrical inclusion, were produced with various dry-weight concentrations of agar and gelatin. Elastic contrasts ranged from 1.5 to 4.6, and values of the storage modulus (real part of the complex Young's modulus) were all in the soft tissue range. Additives assured immunity from bacterial invasion and can produce tissue-mimicking ul...

The Viscoelastic response of hydropolymers, which include gelatin phantom and glandular breast tissue, may be accurately characterized with as few as three parameters using the Kelvin-Voigt Fractional Derivative (KVFD) modeling approach. We propose to image these parameters for simulated and experimental imaging phantoms and to estimate them for normal and cancerous in-vivo breast tissues. Afte...

We present a novel device that allows the user to measure the Young Modulus of a material at the opening of a 5 mm diameter needle. The device relies on a miniaturized cantilever spring mounted at the end of the needle and interrogated via Fabry-Pérot optical fiber interferometry. The probe is repetitively brought in and out of contact with the sample at the end of the needle by means of a stee...

Tissue phantoms play a central role in validating biomedical imaging techniques. Here we employ a series of methods that aim to fully determine the optical properties, i.e., the refractive index n, absorption coefficient μ(a), transport mean free path [Formula: see text], and scattering coefficient μ(s) of a TiO(2) in gelatin phantom intended for use in optoacoustic imaging. For the determinati...

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) provides images at near histological resolution, which allows for the identification of micron sized morphological tissue structures. Optical coherence elastography (OCE) measures tissue displacement and utilizes the high resolution of OCT to generate high-resolution stiffness maps. In this work, we explored the potential of measuring shear wave propagation us...