Breast cancer is anticipated to be responsible for almost 40,000 deaths in the USA in 2011. The current clinical detection techniques suffer from limitations which motivated researchers to investigate alternative modalities for the early detection of breast cancer. This paper focuses on reviewing the main electromagnetic techniques for breast cancer detection. More specifically, this work reviews the cutting edge research in microwave imaging, electrical impedance tomography, diffuse optical tomography, microwave radiometry, biomagnetic detection, biopotential detection, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The goal of this paper is to provide biomedical researchers with an in-depth review that includes all main electromagnetic techniques in the literature and the latest progress in each of these techniques.

Impressions, dentures and other dental appliances may be contaminated with oral micro-flora or other organisms of varying pathogenicity from patient's saliva and blood. Several approaches have been tried to control the transmission of infectious organisms via dental impressions and because disinfection is less effective and has several drawbacks for impression characterization, several sterilization methods have been suggested. This study evaluated the reproducibility of rubber impressions after sterilization by different methods. Dimensional accuracy and wettability of two rubber impression materials (vinyl polysiloxane and polyether) were evaluated after sterilization by each of three well-known methods (immersion in 2% glutaraldehyde for 10 h, autoclaving and microwave radiation). Non-sterilized impressions served as control. The effect of the tray material on impression accuracy and the effect of topical surfactant on the wettability were also evaluated. One-way ANOVA with Dunnett's method was used for statistical analysis. All sterilizing methods reduced the reproducibility of rubber impressions, although not always significantly. Microwave sterilization had a small effect on both accuracy and wettability. The greater effects of the other methods could usually be overcome by using ceramic trays and by spraying impression surfaces with surfactant before pouring the gypsum mix. There was one exception: glutaraldehyde still degraded dimensional accuracy even with ceramic trays and surfactant. We conclude that a) sterilization of rubber impressions made on acrylic trays was usually associated with a degree of dimensional change; b) microwave energy seems to be a suitable technique for sterilizing rubber impressions; c) topical surfactant application helped restore wettability of sterilized impressions.

With advances in anisotropic particle synthesis, particle shape is now a feasible parameter for tuning suspension properties. However, there is a need to determine how these newly synthesized particles with prescribed shapes affect suspension properties and to solve the inverse problem of inferring the shape of particles from property measurements. Either way, accurate suspension property predictions are required. Towards this end, we calculated a set of dilute suspension properties for a family of cube-like shapes that smoothly interpolate between spheres and cubes. Using three conceptually different methods, we numerically computed the electrical properties of particle suspensions, including the intrinsic conductivity of perfect conductors and insulators. We also considered hydrodynamic properties relevant to particle solutions including the hydrodynamic radius, the intrinsic viscosity and the intrinsic solvent diffusivity. Additionally, we determined the second osmotic virial coefficient using analytic expressions along with numerical integration. As the particles became more cube-like, we found that all of the properties investigated become more sensitive to particle shape.

This study presents a model to simulate the electrophysiological activities of multiple Michigan Cancer Foundation-7 (MCF-7) cells, the most studied breast cancer cell line. The intercellular spacing of MCF-7 cells is estimated using the effective diffusion coefficient. Nonuniform finite-difference discretization is implemented to accommodate for the contrast in size between the intercellular spacing and the cell dimension. The model computes the amplitude and the spatiotemporal patterns of biopotentials and electric current densities at different cell division stages. The results show that the biopotentials increase proportionally to the number of cells, especially when all cells are in the hyperpolarization stage. Also, the results show significant electric current density in the intercellular gap between the cells.

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