Many of the early occurring micro-anomalies in breast may transform into a deadliest cancer tumor in future. Probability of curing early occurring abnormalities in breast is more if rightly identified. Even in mammogram, considered as a golden standard technique for breast imaging, it is hard to pick up early occurring changes in the breast tissue due to the difference in mechanical behavior of the normal and abnormal tissue when subjected to compression prior to x-ray or laser exposure. In this paper, an attempt has been made to estimate the stress relaxation time of normal and abnormal breast mimicking phantom using laser speckle image correlation. Phantoms mimicking normal breast is prepared and subjected to precise mechanical compression. The phantom is illuminated by a Helium Neon laser and by using a CCD camera, a sequence of strained phantom speckle images are captured and correlated by the image mean intensity value at specific time intervals. From the relation between mean intensity versus time, tissue stress relaxation time is quantified. Experiments were repeated for phantoms with increased stiffness mimicking abnormal tissue for similar ranges of applied loading. Results shows that phantom with more stiffness representing abnormal tissue shows uniform relaxation for varying load of the selected range, whereas phantom with less stiffness representing normal tissue shows irregular behavior for varying loadings in the given range.

Date Published: 4 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9302, International Conference on Experimental Mechanics 2014, 93023L (4 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2081036

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9302:
International Conference on Experimental Mechanics 2014
Chenggen Quan; Kemao Qian; Anand Asundi; Fook Siong Chau, Editor(s)