A novel inductive tactile probe design for lump detection in soft tissue phantoms

The purpose of this study is the development of a novel tactile probe for detection of lumps in soft tissues. The tactile probe includes an inductive sensor inside an artificial tissue-like silicone rubber cushioning and a square shaped multi-metal array to increase sensitivity. First, a thermoplastic polymer probe was fabricated for housing and the mechanical compression test was executed by material testing machine. Second, the tactile sensor was calibrated between 2.5 N and 25 N within 2.5 N incremental steps and it showed 99.49% linear behavior. In order to measure the performance of the probe, 16 cylindrical silicone phantoms were used in three different scenarios. Each phantom was embedded by hard plastic inclusions in different depths and sizes. Finally, human palpation experiments were conducted by 10 naive subjects for the same scenarios above. The comparison results showed that, especially for deep inclusions at low forces, human subjects had high false diagnose rates, while the tactile sensor could detect the deep inclusions at all force levels (ANOVA, p < 0:001). In summary, our novel tactile probe showed better performance than human palpation. © 2020 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved.