SmartProbe: a bioimpedance sensing system for head and neck cancer tissue detection

Abstract

Objectives: This study presents SmartProbe, an electrical bioimpedance (EBI) sensing system based on a concentric needle electrode (CNE). The system allows the use of commercial CNEs for accurate EBI measurement, and was specially developed for in-vivo real-time cancer detection. Approach: Considering the uncertainties in EBI measurements due to the CNE manufacturing tolerances, we propose a calibration method based on statistical learning. This is done by extracting the correlation between the measured impedance value |Z|, and the material conductivity σ, for a group of reference materials. By utilizing this correlation, the relationship of σ and |Z| can be described as a function and reconstructed using a single measurement on a reference material of known conductivity. Main results: This method simplifies the calibration process, and is verified experimentally. Its effectiveness is demonstrate by results that show less than 6% relative error. An additional experiment is conducted for evaluating the system’s capability to detect cancerous tissue. Four types of ex-vivo human tissue from the head and neck region, including mucosa, muscle, cartilage and salivary gland, are characterized using SmartProbe. The measurements include both cancer and surrounding healthy tissue excised from 10 different patients operated on for head and neck cancer. The measured data is then processed using dimension reduction and analyzed for tissue classification. The final results show significant differences between pathologic and healthy tissues in muscle, mucosa and cartilage specimens. Significance: These results are highly promising and indicate a great potential for SmartProbe to be used in various cancer detection tasks.

Smart handheld medical device with patient-specific force regulation mechanism

“…Specifically, the instrument integrates a 3D-printed compliant mechanism to regulate the applied force on the tissue during the measurement of the tissue electrical bioimpedance (EBI). The EBI reflects the electrical characteristics of a tissue region and it has been demonstrated for identifying different tissue types (Faes et al , 1999) and even different pathological levels (Cheng et al , 2020; Baghbani et al , 2019). Since the diseased tissue has a looser cellular structure and contains more water as well as conductive ions (Naranjo-Hernández et al , 2019), its electrical conductivity is lower compared to the surrounding normal tissue.…”

A Multi-Frequency Focused Impedance Measurement System Based on Analogue Synchronous Peak Detection

“…Bioimpedance is an emerging technique for monitoring anatomical structures and physiological processes. Recent studies demonstrated the use of bioimpedance techniques in different applications including cancer detection (Cheng et al, 2020;Mansouri et al, 2020;Tidy and Brown, 2021), tissue hydration (Lukaski et al, 2019), body composition (Vermeiren et al, 2021), vascular fluid flow (Anand et al, 2021) and bedside monitoring (Mulasi et al, 2015;Morais et al, 2021).…”

Smart handheld device with flexible wrist and electrical bioimpedance sensor for tissue inspection

“…8 It is featured with high accuracy, non-invasive, safe, and fast processing. Successful applications in cancer detection have been reported in Cheng et al, 9 Murdoch et al, 10 Pathiraja et al 11 In addition, the anatomic environment is usually complex, and thus it requires the probe of the SMI to be designed in a small size and possess sufficient dexterity. 12 Several previous studies have proposed different wrist designs based on conventional mechanical linkages such as ball joints, 13 universal joints, 14 cables and pulleys, 15,16 lead screws, 17,18 and serial chains in parallel.…”

“…8 It is featured with high accuracy, non-invasive, safe, and fast processing. Successful applications in cancer detection have been reported in Cheng et al, 9 Murdoch et al, 10 Pathiraja et al 11…”