1994 Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 342-350
An palpation is one of the most important means of the diagnosis. We have developed a master-slave micro-manipulator system for palpating even the impalpable part. By operating this system, an operator can perceive the stiffness of small part of tissue with his/her tactile sense. If an operator knows the value of tissue's stiffness evaluated by computer, he/she can judge the stiffness with more confidence. To this end, we propose the method of estimating the tissue's stiffness by the fuzzy reasoning in this paper. We incorporate the expert's subjective scale of stiffness based on their experience in their own field into this method. And, the estimation are represented by linguistic values, not by numerical values of the physical parameter that depends on the stiffness
