Development of a Breast Ultrasound Phantom for Medical Training

Ultrasound (US) phantoms are models that aim to simulate human tissues with the same or similar acoustic properties. They are used for training clinical procedures, diagnostic techniques and testing and calibration of new systems. Some models for these purposes can be found in the literature, but their reproducibility in terms of lesion placement is restricted. This work aims to construct a breast phantom to plan and train breast biopsy. We propose a strategy to construct a synthetic breast phantom compatible with US using a pour-in-mold approach. The presented study focuses on the design and production of the breast phantom with lesion. This technique focuses on the correct representation of a base model and positioning reproducibility of the lesion. Based on the literature, an ideal 3D breast model was created in SolidWorks. This model is used as a reference for molds creation and after 3D printed. These molds were filled with a Ballistic Gel based mixture. Two experiments were set to validate the proposed methodology, with these experiments were presenting the minimum and the maximum error relative to the breast and lesion volume, also giving the error relative to the method used for lesion positioning. The described methodology allows the construction of a phantom with an error of 1.47 +/- 0.78mm in the breast surface, compared to the ideal model (i.e. CAD version). Concerning the lesion's centroid, an error of 0.52 +/- 0.23mm was detected. The described strategy proved to be an accurate, fast production and low-cost model to be used in the training of breast biopsies procedures.