Yeah! Breast Cancer!

I’ve finally found out what my fourth year (well, fifth year for me) design project will be and it’s awesome. There were basically two crappy projects and one good one. My team beat the odds to get the best project which involves, you guessed it, breast cancer!

The specifics: The goal of the project is to build a small, cheap, portable, and easy to use device for detecting tumors in the breast. The principles are fairly simple. Healthy breast tissue consists almost entirely of fat, which is not good at absorbing near-infrared light (red light, basically). However, tumors grow lots of blood vessels to feed themselves with, and the hemoglobin in the blood does strongly absorb near-infrared light. Thus, if you shine said light on the breast and measure how much light is reflected, any tumors should show up as dark spots. By fortunate coincidence, the lasers in CD players operate at 780nm, exactly the frequency absorbed by hemoglobin. It is also easy to get LEDs (those little blinking lights on your VCR) that work in this range (which is what we’ll probably end up using). Hopefully, we’ll be able to come up with a design cheap enough (and easy enough to use) that it can be used in third world countries, remote northern locations, or even purchased at a health equipment store.

I’m also excited about working with the professors who are supervising this project. I’ve had three classes with one of them and I know he’s very easy to work with and he has an engineering approach to things. The other guy also seems very good, though I’ve only met him once. I believe that groups that have worked with these supervisors in the past have done quite well in the design competitions (the two professors normally work as a team). Actually having some supervisors with experience is quite rare.

So in conclusion: Yeah breast cancer detector!