Executive Summary

This project, sponsored by Dr. Eghtedari from the Department of Radiology at the Moore’s Cancer Center, aims to create a personal device that will allow for the early detection of breast cancer. Currently, one in eight women in the US are affected by this disease with only an 83% survival rate. With early detection, however, patients have a 97% survival rate, meaning that early detection is key to combatting breast cancer. By designing a personal device that women can test on themselves, Dr. Eghtedari plans on helping women achieve this heightened survival rate. 

The guiding principle behind this project is that fact that sound travels faster through a cancerous tumor than it does through healthy breast tissue. As such, measuring a speed change in a women affected with breast cancer will allow for tumor detection at early stages, especially when the tumor cannot be felt by the patient themselves.

The device itself utilizes a set of transducers, a caliper, and a microcontroller attached to a PCB in order to perform this speed calculation. The transducers are attached onto the two jaws of the caliper and work together in order to obtain the time data need to find the speed of sound. By measuring the time of flight of a transducer pulse through the breast, a time measurement can be found. The caliper holding these two transducers works to send the distance data by outputting a digital signal to the microcontroller stating the distance between the two transducers i.e. the width of the breast. The microcontroller then uses this time and distance measurement to calculate the speed of sound before displaying the result on a numeric display. The PCB is used to send and receive the transducer pulse while also relaying the signal to and from the microcontroller and onto the LCD numeric display. Note that a housing was also built in order to safely store the PCB and microcontroller components of this device.

After initial testing, it was found that the device does indeed have the necessary sensitivity needed to detect the 100 m/s difference in speed of sound given two different mediums with only a 3% difference in measurement from the theoretical speed. Additionally, repeated testing for the same two-medium setup at different distances yielded fairly similar sound speeds with a standard deviation of merely 0.2%. As such, it is clear the device operates well and accurately. Future recommendations would require only that the device be tested on biological subjects in order to get a more representative test of the actual usage of the device.