Electrical Impedance-Based Methodology for Locating Carcinoma Emulators on Breast Models

Abstract

There is a worldwide need for new methodologies to prediagnose breast cancer in an early stage, which helps to notably increase the possibility of saving the mammary gland or patient’s life. This work describes a new methodology proposal based on electrical impedance for the localization of preclinical carcinoma emulators in agar phantoms of the breast. The impedance is systematically measured through eight Ag/AgCl electrodes uniformly distributed in a ring arrangement placed on the breast agar phantom. The fundamental idea of the proposed location algorithm, named Anomaly Tracking Circle algorithm, is to find the breast agar area defined by straight lines joining the electrode pairs having the minimum difference value of the defined normalized impedance magnitude along the measurement sweep. Such difference is obtained with respect to a breast agar phantom without carcinoma emulator. The proposed methodology was evaluated through seven experimental agar models, six of them having carcinoma lobe emulators with different locations and electrical conductivities. According to the obtained results, the described methodology can obtain the location zone of preclinical-emulated carcinomas with an 83.33% success.