Quantitative assessment of soft tissue deformation using digital speckle pattern interferometry: studies on phantom...

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Optical Metrology
• Materials Science

Background:

• Assessing soft matter mechanical properties noninvasively is crucial for medical diagnostics.
• Tissue mechanical properties are vital indicators of health status.
• Noncontact methods are essential for large-scale medical screening.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a noninvasive, noncontact method for assessing soft tissue mechanical properties.
• To extract deformation information from single fringe patterns using digital speckle pattern interferometry (DSPI).
• To evaluate the method's efficacy on breast tissue phantoms with simulated anomalies.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of soft phantoms mimicking breast tissue optical and mechanical properties.
• Utilizing a digital speckle pattern interferometry (DSPI) setup in an out-of-plane configuration.
• Developing a Hilbert transform (HT)-based algorithm for phase and deformation extraction from single fringe patterns.
• Comparing experimental results with finite element analysis (FEA) simulations using Abaqus software.

Main Results:

• The HT-based algorithm successfully extracted deformation information from single fringe patterns.
• Experimental deformation patterns correlated well with numerically simulated patterns (average %error of 10).
• The method was successfully applied to breast phantoms containing subsurface anomalies.

Conclusions:

• The proposed DSPI method with HT-based analysis offers a viable noninvasive approach for evaluating soft tissue mechanical properties.
• This technique has potential applications in medical screening, particularly for detecting subsurface anomalies in breast tissue.
• The correlation between experimental and numerical results validates the accuracy and reliability of the developed method.