Hey everyone! Welcome back to another week of blog posts. We’ve been really hard at work prototyping this week, trying our best to get our model ready for the showcase!
We left off last week brainstorming ways to accurately capture the feel of a cyst. While we have had some ideas, modeling this has been a pretty difficult process. Clinicians describe cysts as feeling similar to a grape, or a liquid-filled mass that is much softer and rounder than a tumor. Our minds jumped from place to place, eventually coming up with something practical to mimic this lesion: a balloon filled with a liquid. Our first prototype consisted of latex balloons found in the OEDK, filled with Elmer’s glue, so we could obtain that liquid feel, while still maintaining a bit of stiffness so clinicians would be able to feel it.
Additionally, cysts have been described as much more moveable in breast tissue in comparison to malignant lesions. Fortunately for us, the issue that we had last week with the curing of the silicone in this case, actually worked to our benefit. Silicone, as far as we were able to tell, could cure around the latex balloon material but still remained inhibited enough to allow movement of this lesion within the tissue!
While this worked to our benefit, ultimately the first prototyping of our cyst was not very accurate according to feedback from the clinician meeting. Due to the glue still not being thick enough, it was ultimately difficult to distinguish the lesion from the fatty breast tissue, leaving much to be desired. This being the case, it was back to the drawing board. We needed to find a material that was thick enough to be detected in our tissue, while still being liquid enough to resemble a “grape-like” feel. We brainstormed material after material until we came to the realization that the answer was (hopefully) right in front of us: fill the balloon with the soft silicone.
We had decided to make a new cyst sample material with the soft silicone and were blown away by just how much it resembled, in our eyes, what a cyst was supposed to feel like. We are very confident that clinicians are going to like this! However, just in case we are mistaken, we’re still brainstorming.
Clinicians had additionally proposed two more potential areas for improvement for our model. For one, while our fibroadenoma had a good texture, it needed to be far more moveable within the breast tissue to be fully accurate. Thus, we plan to find a way to capture this effect, as are current fibroadenoma is made of silicone, which evidently does inhibit the curing of other silicone. Secondly, clinicians indicated that while our model felt great, it was definitely time to upscale the model. Thus, we are in the process of printing a larger mold, which we will use for the showcase next week!
Finally, one other event of note transpired on the day of the clinician meeting. On the way to the meeting, Diya and I had come to the realization that we had yet to come up with a team name. We don’t know how we’ve gone this far without this passing our mind, but nevertheless, we digress. After some brainstorming and throwing out some pretty goofy names, we eventually were able to agree on a name. Thus, Team Breast Buddies was born!
We are getting to the final stretch! We’re only one more week from our final showcase and the end of the internship. It feels so bizarre saying that! My apologies for devolving back into cliches (I know I had promised not to do this a few weeks ago) but this internship has flown by. It’s amazing our project has come this far in such a short amount of time. With that being said, we still have a little ways to go! Thank you all so much for coming back for this week’s blog post, and keeping up with me throughout this internship journey! Hope to see you back here for the final post next week.