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 tissue. The tactile probe includes an inductive sensor inside of an artificial tissue-like silicon rubber cushioning and a square shaped multi-metal-array to increase sensitivity. Firstly, a thermoplastic polymer probe was fabricated for housing and the mechanical compression test was executed by material testing machine. Secondly, the tactile sensor was calibrated between 2.5N-25N by 2.5N incremental steps and showed 99.49% linear behavior. In order to measure probe’s performance, 16 cylindrical silicon phantoms were used in three different scenarios. Each phantom was embedded by hard plastic inclusions at 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