Capacitive Tactile Sensor Error Effects on Lesion Sizing in Tactile Breast Screening - A Phantom Study

Tactile Imaging (TI) for breast cancer screening typically utilizes capacitive pressure sensors for the detection, sizing, and monitoring of lesions. This paper addresses the effect of TI error sources: hysteresis, creep, cross-coupling, and thermal sensitivity, on breast lesion detection and characterization. A TI breast screening device (Bexa) is used normally, on silicone based training phantoms, with dimension and hardness measurements compared as environmental and usage parameters are varied over normal use ranges. Over extended use case ranges, these errors do not significantly affect breast lesion sizing, with variations <5%. Temperature sensitivity has the biggest effect generally, significantly impacting estimation of hardness, but this does not impact whether a lesion is detected or not. This is indicative that TI performance variability in the literature is due to operator use variability rather than sensor performance. This work provides an initial assessment on the effect of TI sensor error sources practical breast lesion reporting, providing additional confidence in TI for screening, and direction for future development of the technique.