Prototype of a Digital Biopsy Device

Abstract:
This project was inspired by current research of one of the team members, Grant, in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Cornell. He is investigating how mechanical stresses to tissue can provide information on the tissue’s health. Electrical tomography devices currently exist in the medical community, however, they focus just on analyzing electrical signals through the body to spot abnormalities. No major projects currently utilize a system that manipulates both electrical and mechanical properties of tissue at once in attempts to characterize its health, and thus a potentially attractive, yet nondestructive device lends itself to our ECE 476 project. Grant’s previous work in the research group had been to develop a simple two-electrode probe that could apply a suction pressure to tissue, and monitor the electrical resistance between the electrodes in hopes to find a correlation between elongation and resistance. Currently, a more sophisticated probe was developed with a microarray of 6 pairs of electrodes, and a more elaborate method of testing could now be used.

Source: Cornell University