Skip to main content
2024 BMES Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.

Cancer Technologies

Cancer Technologies - Poster Session E

Poster G8 - Piezoelectric Nanofibrous Patch for Breast Cancer Detection

Saturday, October 26, 2024
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EST
Location: Exhibit Hall E, F & G

Introduction:  Breast cancer is the most common cancer in America, making up 30% of all newly diagnosed cases each year. Mainly through mammograms, observation of breast tumor size and spread are used to diagnose and stage cancer. Although women over the age of 40 can regularly get mammograms, younger women often face high costs due to lack of insurance coverage when attempting to get screened. A cheap, self-powered, and portable screening method for breast tumors that can be performed independently outside of the clinical setting will increase early cancer detection and lower mortality rates.

Materials and

Methods:  Piezoelectric polymers, which generate charge in response to mechanical stress, have great potential for biomedical sensing applications due to their excellent flexibility, biocompatibility, and ability to be self-powered. Electrospinning the polymer results in highly aligned and flexible piezoelectric nanofibers that can be utilized as the functional material of a battery-free, flexible electronic sensor for biomedical applications. Through harnessing the piezoelectric effect, a nanofibrous sensor can be developed to correlate the elastic modulus of tissue and output voltage since breast tumors and healthy breast tissue have reported elastic moduli of approximately 10 kPa and 800 Pa respectively.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: To correlate the sensor’s output voltage with material stiffness, conventional tests were performed with (1) varying forces using the same material and (2) materials of different stiffnesses at a constant applied force. The sensor showed increasing output voltage with both increasing force and increasing material stiffness, making it suitable for non-invasive tumor detection outside of clinical settings. It is also capable of detecting hard masses below softer surfaces, which is promising for applications of breast tumor detection. Future work will optimize device design to incorporate circuitry that eliminates operator dependance, as well as allowing for wireless data transmission capabilities. Moreover, the inverse piezoelectric effect will be used to apply constant force during breast tumor detection, thus eliminating human error.

Acknowledgements (Optional):  Thank you to the National Science Foundation's Undergraduate Research and Innovation Experience in Cancer Diagnosis and Therapeutic Intervention, as well as Dr. Nellone Reid and Dr. Sagnik Basuray.