Tumor Detection With a New Boundary Integral Equation Formulation

During pathological evolution, tissues mechanical properties, such as elastic moduli, will be changed. This feature has already been used in theory and application of elastography for detecting and characterizing tumors. In this paper, a tumor mass embedded in a breast tissue is modeled as an Eshelby inhomogeneity problem. Using a new anisotropic boundary element method (BEM) developed recently by the authors, the stress and strain fields due to an external load are solved efficiently and accurately. Furthermore, an inverse algorithm is also proposed for the detection and characterization of the embedded tumor mass. Numerical examples are presented to show that the BEM algorithm based on the Eshelby inclusion concept provides a useful method to solve certain biomedical problems.