Wearable Ultrasound Diagnostic: A New Era In Breast Cancer Detection?
MIT researchers have come up with a wearable ultrasound device that aims to detect breast cancer in its early stage. This device comes with a piezoelectric material, making it possible to offer the ultrasound imaging facility in the form of a tiny patch.
Further, it is especially going to benefit women who are more prone to developing tumors and breast cancer between their mammogram sessions.
This indeed can be a new era in breast cancer detection as early detection comes with around 100% guarantee for cure and survival. When a tumor is detected or diagnosed in the later stage, the chance of survival goes down by around 25%.
Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in MIT’s Media Lab and the senior author of the study, says, “We changed the form factor of the ultrasound technology so that it can be used in your home. It’s portable and easy to use and provides real-time, user-friendly monitoring of breast tissue.”
With this change in the form factor, the UV detection device looks like a regular and flexible patch. The patch can be attached to one’s bra for the movement of the ultrasound tracker.
Thus, it will be easier to capture images of breast tissues from six various angles. Further, this wearable device will likely produce images with resolutions equivalent to those offered by regular USG devices at medical setups.
The device also comes with a 3D print, and its opening resembles a honeycomb. You can easily attach it to your bra with the help of a magnet. And it can be operated by anyone as it does not demand special medical expertise or training.
The paper, highlighting this new-age, wearable USG device for the early detection of breast cancer, appears in Science Advances. Dabin Lin, a professor at Xi’an Technological University, Research Scientist Lin Zhang, Emma Suh ’23, and MIT graduate student Wenya Du are the lead authors of this paper.
Regarding this device, Dagdeviren says, “My goal is to target the people who are most likely to develop interval cancer. With more frequent screening, our goal to increase the survival rate to up to 98 percent.”
Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering and one of the authors of this paper, says, “This technology provides a fundamental capability in the detection and early diagnosis of breast cancer, which is key to a positive outcome.”
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