Tissue Viscoelasticity Quantification Using Smartphone Tactile Imaging Probe With an Indenter and Viscoelastic Pitting Recovery Model

Viscoelasticity of human tissue often carries important physiological information linking to many fatal diseases, such as heart failure, renal impairment, and liver failure. Fluid retention due to these diseases cause swelling of body parts (edema) and changes the viscoelastic characteristic of the tissue. We hypothesize that the viscoelastic behavior change of the tissue can be estimated by creating and quantifying the pit on the swelled body parts. Here, we present a smartphone tactile imaging probe with an indenter (STIP-I) system that measures the pitting parameters and characterizes the viscoelastic behavior. This system consists of tactile imaging sensing that utilizes a light diffusion in a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based optical waveguide and a Viscoelastic Pitting Recovery (VPR) computation model. The prototype STIP-I system is tested using edematous tissue phantoms, which show a moderate measurement error of 29.5% for the pitting parameters and excellent performance of 7.60% error in elastic modulus estimation. The STIP-I system is expected to bring a new approach to understanding viscoelasticity changes due to various diseases.