A Groundbreaking Breakthrough from our Member of the Board of Trustees Assoc. Prof. Canan Dağdeviren

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Canan Dağdeviren, KHAS Member of the Board of Trustees, and her team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have completed the “electronic bra” [Conformable Ultrasound Breast Patch (cUSBr-Patch)] project, a wearable ultrasound device they have been working on for six years, and announced with an article published in Science Advances last week.

The device is a flexible patch that can be attached to a bra, allowing the wearer to move an ultrasound tracker along the patch and image the breast tissue from different angles.

“We changed the form factor of the ultrasound technology so that it can be used in your home. It’s portable and easy to use, and provides real-time, user-friendly monitoring of breast tissue,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in MIT’s Media Lab and the senior author of the study.

MIT graduate student Wenya Du, Research Scientist Lin Zhang, Emma Suh ’23, and Dabin Lin, a professor at Xi’an Technological University, are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances.

Dr. Dagdeviren, whose research group specializes in developing wearable electronic devices that conform to the body, drew inspiration from her late aunt, Fatma Caliskanoglu, who was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer at age 49, despite having regular cancer screens, and passed away six months later. At her aunt’s bedside, Dagdeviren, then a postdoc at MIT, drew up a rough schematic of a diagnostic device that could be incorporated into a bra and would allow for more frequent screening of individuals at high risk for breast cancer.

To make the device wearable, the researchers designed a flexible, 3D-printed patch, which has honeycomb-like openings. Using magnets, this patch can be attached to a bra that has openings that allow the ultrasound scanner to contact the skin. The ultrasound scanner fits inside a small tracker that can be moved to six different positions, allowing the entire breast to be imaged. The scanner can also be rotated to take images from different angles, and does not require any special expertise to operate.

Please click to read the details about the project: https://news.mit.edu/2023/wearable-ultrasound-scanner-breast-cancer-0728