The manipulator, designed by a team at the University of Bristol and based at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, is able to apply very specific forces over a range similar to forces used by human examiners and can detect lumps using sensor technology at larger depths than before. 

This could revolutionise how women monitor their breast health by giving them access to safe electronic CBEs, located in easily accessible places, such as pharmacies and health centres, which provide accurate results.     

Precision, repeatability and accuracy are of paramount importance in these tactile medical examinations to ensure favourable patient outcomes. A range of automatic and semi-automatic devices have been proposed to aid with optimising this task, particularly for difficult to detect and hard to reach situations such as during minimally invasive surgery. 

The team created their manipulator using 3D printing and other Computerised Numerical Control techniques and employed a combination of laboratory experiments and simulated experiments on a fake (silicone) breast and its digital twin, both modelled on a volunteer at the Simulation and Modelling in Medicine and Surgery research group at Imperial College London. 

The simulations allowed the team to perform thousands of palpations and test lots of hypothetical scenarios such as calculating the difference in efficiency when using two, three, or four sensors at the same time. In the lab, they were able to carry out the experiments on the silicone breast to demonstrate the simulations were accurate and to experimentally discover the forces for the real equipment. 

Read the full University of Bristol news item

‘A robotIc Radial palpatIon mechaniSm for breast examination (IRIS)’ by George Jenkinson et al which was presented at the RO-MAN conference.