Breast phantoms: From idea to action

MAP stu­dents Lara Đele­vić and Akshat Shar­ma shared a pas­sion for solv­ing prob­lems in hu­man healthcare and while know­ing that for sci­ence to be­come truly im­pact­ful, it must make busi­ness sense as well. Hence, they joined the Exist­ency pro­gram, a highly selec­tive startup in­cuba­tor pro­gram of FAU Er­langen-Nürn­berg and two other uni­versi­ties of ap­plied sci­ences within the Met­ropol­itan Re­gion Nu­rem­berg. Here, they learnt not only the basics of busi­ness, but also the pro­cess of idea­ting and origi­nal think­ing. “The Exist­ency po­gram not only taught us the basics of entre­pre­neurship, but also the skills for idea­tion and prob­lem-solving”, Akshat re­calls. “And above all, we learnt to face our fears and de­velop trust in our ide­as”, adds Lara.

As every year more than 2 mil­lion wom­en glob­ally get diag­nosed with breast can­cer, the two re­sourceful stu­dents of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram “Ad­vanced Ma­terials and Pro­cess­es” de­cided to work on this prob­lem. Many of them have to un­dergo not only pain­ful tumor re­moval pro­ce­dures, but also sub­se­quent chemo- or radio­thera­py. Lara and Akshat ad­dressed a com­mon prob­lem dur­ing this fol­low­ing part of the medi­cal treat­ment: inad­equate fix­ing of the breast dur­ing radio­thera­py. To tackle this, and to ad­dress the body-image con­cerns that wom­en can feel while lying with­out a top cover, they came up with a cus­tomized 3D-printed medi­cal bra made of mate­rials that won’t inter­fere with radio­thera­py – a simple inno­vation that could help with a major prob­lem. Laura’s and Akshat’s idea also re­ceived recognition at the FAU Start Up Demo Day 2022, where they se­cured the sec­ond place.

It was from here that they de­cided to dig deep­er into the field, and got in touch with physi­cians and pro­fes­sors to un­der­stand some of the prob­lems they face dur­ing clini­cal prac­tice. These inter­ac­tions led to the idea of tis­sue-equiva­lent phan­toms, the topic of their study re­search pro­ject.

In a sec­ond step, the duo start­ed work­ing at the Uni­versi­ty Hos­pital Er­langen in the De­part­ment of Radi­ology to de­velop tis­sue-equiva­lent phan­toms for breast can­cer. These are physi­cal mod­els that show simi­lar be­havior to radia­tion as the hu­man breast. Hence, each time a new imag­ing mo­dality (a dif­ferent type of CT imag­ing) is used, its quali­ty can be tested on this model rather than on hu­mans. Moreover, such mod­els can help in as­sessing the re­quired radia­tion dose as well as in train­ing young physi­cians for new thera­pies such as brachytherapy.

Most com­mer­cially avail­able mod­els are simple ho­mogenous struc­tures that fail to cap­ture the com­plexi­ty of the breast tissue. In reali­ty, the breast is not just a single ho­mogenous tissue, but is com­posed of fat, mus­cle and con­nec­tive tissue, each of which inter­acts dif­ferently with radia­tion. Moreover, the rela­tive com­posi­tion of these three com­po­nents changes across the thick­ness of the breast, and can vary con­sider­ably based on age and other phys­iolog­ical fac­tors. It is this com­plexi­ty that Lara and Akshat are trying to incor­porate in their mod­el. For this, they are using mul­ti-mate­rial 3D print­ing after recon­struct­ing a 3D model from the CT imag­es.

Text: Lara Đelević und Akshat Sharma, Elite Graduate Program Advanced Materials and Processes