Development of Measurement Method of Biological Flexibility by Using Excitation

Abstract

Palpation is an important diagnostic technique in medicine. However, it is subjective, and successful diagnosis depends on the skill and experience of the doctor. Therefore, a quantitative method for measuring the hardness of the living body and detecting abnormal tissue is desirable. Purpose of this study is to evaluate hardness of a single soft tissue quantitatively. The soft tissue is modeled using a three-dimensional finite element method. And we propose a method to identify a Young's modulus of the tissue from the change of the natural frequency of a vibrator attached to the top of the tissue. To confirm the validity of the method, we measured the Young's modulus of silicones by using the proposed method. The measurement results by the proposed method agreed with the value obtained with a parallel disk rotary rheometer. These results confirmed that our method is capable of measuring the Young's modulus of the soft materials.