Accurate characterization of benign and cancerous breast tissues: Aspecific patient studies using piezoresistive microcantilevers

Abstract

Breast cancer is the largest detected cancer amongst women in the US. In this work, our team reports on the development of piezoresistive microcantilevers (PMCs) to investigate their potential use in the accurate detection and characterization of benign and diseased breast tissues by performing indentations on the micro-scale tissue specimens. The PMCs used in these experiments have been fabricated using laboratory-made silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate, which significantly reduces the fabrication costs. The PMCs are 260 μm long, 35 μm wide and 2 μm thick with resistivity of order 1.316 X 10−3 Ω-cm obtained by using boron diffusion technique. For indenting the tissue, we utilized 8 μm thick cylindrical SU-8 tip. The PMC was calibrated against a known AFM probe. Breast tissue cores from seven different specimens were indented using PMC to identify benign and cancerous tissue cores. Furthermore, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) of benign and cancerous specimens showed marked differences in the tissue morphology, which further validates our observed experimental data with the PMCs. While these patient aspecific feasibility studies clearly demonstrate the ability to discriminate between benign and cancerous breast tissues, further investigation is necessary to perform automated mechano-phenotyping (classification) of breast cancer: from onset to disease progression.

Robot-Guided Atomic Force Microscopy for Mechano-Visual Phenotyping of Cancer Specimens

“…The results of those studies indicated that cancerous epithelial breast tissue specimens exhibited lower elasticity compared with benign samples, which was in accordance to the results obtained from tumor regions on needle biopsy specimens by Plodinec et al (2012). Recent investigations conducted by our group using piezoresistive measurements yielded similar observations (Pandya et al, 2014, 2015). …”

“…Recent investigations conducted by our group using piezoresistive measurements yielded similar observations (Pandya et al, 2014(Pandya et al, , 2015.…”

Design and fabrication of a flexible MEMS-based electro-mechanical sensor array for breast cancer diagnosis

“…Recently, much attention is focused on flexible, or skin-like sensor array with multiscale architectures for detecting mechanical, chemical, thermal, and optical changes [8-17]. The capability of analyzing and manipulating the biological materials at microscale and nanoscale and the possibility of incorporating it into portable lab-on-a-chip devices makes the MEMS sensor a potential candidate for diagnostic capabilities [18-26]. Each year in USA alone, more than 200,000 breast cancer cases are diagnosed [27].…”

Electromechanical Coupling Factor of Breast Tissue as a Biomarker for Breast Cancer

“…Invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and normal breast tissue specimens were carefully selected and extracted from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey Biospecimen Repository Shared Resource. Even though our specimens from a biobank went through preparation and preservation, our previous efforts showed the same trend of mechanical characteristics when compared with studies on fresh tissues from biopsy [27], [28]. Therefore, we chose to prototype and experiment with our new devices on banked human breast tissues which are easily accessible over fresh tissues.…”