Silicone Breast Phantoms for use with Digital Imaging Elasto-Tomography Breast Cancer Screening

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer and has the highest mortality rate among all types of cancer. The current best method to prevent deaths from breast cancer is by early detection. The gold standard for breast cancer detection screening is X-ray mammography. However, it has several limitations, including invasive radiation exposure and poor performance in younger women with dense breast tissue. Digital Imaging Elasto-Tomography is a novel breast cancer screening device using mechanical vibrations and computer vision algorithms to determine the actuated breast tissue surface motion and, from them, infer the elastic properties of underlying breast tissue. It leverages the 400-1000% stiffness contrast between health breast tissues and tumor tissues. To further develop this device breast phantoms are required to test device software, hardware, use, and to quantify diagnostic algorithm performance on repeatable phantom test subjects. These phantoms need to have elastic properties appropriately representing realistic breast tissues and tumor tissues. The production of both asymmetric, realistically shaped and symmetric breast phantoms are detailed. Each of these phantoms is comprised of different silicone compositions representing different tissues, including a skin layer, healthy fat tissue, and cancerous tumour tissue. Several tests were performed to validate these phantoms, including compression testing to determine the elastic modulus and its location within reported human tissue stiffness value ranges.