Suitability of a point-contact SAW-based stiffness transducer for biomedical applications

Methods of diagnosis in biomedical applications can be broadly divided into contact and noncontact based methods. So far, ultrasound based methods have been found to be most favorable for noncontact, noninvasive diagnosis, especially in the case of tissue stiffness analysis. We report here, the fabrication and characterization details of a contact based transducer system for qualitative determination of the stiffnesses of nonpiezoelectric substrates using the phenomenon of surface acoustic waves (SAW). Preliminary trials to study the functionality of this system were carried out on various metallic and nonmetallic substrates, and the results were found to be satisfactory. To confirm the suitability of this system for biomedical applications, similar trials have been conducted on tissue mimicking phantoms with varying degrees of stiffness