Abstract:
Breast cancer incidence and mortality are drastically increasing globally. The factor behind these
problems are complex but reflect both aging and growth of the population within a given country.
On top of this, regardless of Country’s economic profiles, breast cancer incidence is dramatically
spreading both in developed and developing regions. In order to tackle this problems, breast
cancer detection and screening techniques have been introduced to both national and global
market. X-ray mammography, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are the most
commonly being used techniques for the detection of cancerous tissues in breast. Furthermore,
several researches have been done to characterize breast tissues even though they come up with
their critical down falls which underscores the need for an improved technique for breast tissues
characterization that can satisfies the need of wider community.
In this study the Bioelectric Impedance Spectroscopy was used to characterize the breast tissue
samples in ex-vivo setup to identify and analysis the frequency response of malignant and normal
breast tissues. The AFE (Analog Front End) circuitry was designed to achieve the four electrodes
configuration of Ad5933evalboard.Breast tissues which were collected from 20 patients were
characterized with excitation current 1 KHZ-100 KHZ frequency ranges. The primary results
indicated that there was significant difference between the frequency response of normal and
malignant breast tissues with their dielectric properties. The result from ANOVA (Analysis of
Variance) test illustrated that there was significant statistical difference (p=0.0002) among the
phase angle of three breast tissue samples .More importantly Turkey’s Honestly Significant
Difference Post Hoc test showed that there was significant difference (p<0.001) between two
groups of breast tissue samples (normal tissues and high grade cancerous lesions) at p=0.05 level
of significance. The results of bode and Nyquist plot also indicated that there was a significant
differences in the frequency responses of malignant and normal breast tissues particularly in their
magnitude and phase values. The results of this study strongly suggested that BIS (Bioimpedance
Spectroscopy) technique can be used to identify breast cancer. However, large scale and in-vivo
study required before applying as routine clinical instruments
