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Fortunately, the knot soon vanished. Bohra said the experience, which happened in India during the Covid-19 pandemic, was a “little concerning… but also really easy” thanks to her family connection – but she quickly realised how difficult it is for many others.
Studying the innovation design engineering masters course at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, Bohra and project partner Debra Babalola investigated the available tools for women to monitor their breasts. The pair were ‘astonished’ to find a serious lack of at-home solutions for the early detection of cancer, so they set out to address that need.
Dotplot is the result of their work. The at-home breast health monitoring tool, which won the national leg of the James Dyson Award in September, aims to reduce the rate of deaths from breast cancer by use of early detection.
Self-check routine
The system – including a handheld device for mapping the user’s chest and scanning for abnormalities in the breast tissue, and a mobile application connected via Bluetooth – is designed to enable and encourage women to stick to a regular self-check routine and identify potential issues.
Users start by entering the details of their period cycle, if they have one, to offer the correct date for their self-check. They then build a personalised map of their torso by providing their bra size, breast shape, and sliding the handheld device over their chest to reshape the ‘baseline model’.
Once set up, the app guides women through the self-check by showing which areas they need to cover. A sound signal is emitted as the user moves the scanner over her breasts, which records tissue composition in a similar way to ultrasound scans. A different frequency is used, although Bohra told Professional Engineering she could not share further information at this stage.
Each month’s reading is compared to previous readings to highlight any abnormalities. “The idea is to be able to detect if there is a lump, if there is a change,” says Bohra. “The baseline scale within the system would be able to say ‘It’s just a mammary duct’… it shouldn’t be flagging abnormalities for minor changes. But if there is any major change, which is not common, it would flag that up.”
The partners hope that their system could save many lives. “If you catch it early, your survival rates increase up to 93%,” says Bohra. “The whole goal is to make sure that all the detections are caught early.”
Next steps
During technical development, the prototype could detect lumps up to 15mm deep in tests with a surrogate. Refinements and the use of machine learning were added to help identify lumps at different depths.
The team’s next step, aided by £5,000 from the James Dyson Award, will be to combine the mapping and lump detection aspects into a compact, handheld device, as seen in promotional images. They then hope to run their first clinical trial, and aim to sell Dotplot “within the next few years”. Further ahead, the technology could be adapted for other cancers and illnesses such as testicular cancer and soft-tissue sarcoma.
The cost of care for stage three and four cancers is nearly three times that for less-advanced stages one and two, with a difference of roughly £7,700, according to Bohra. Catching cases earlier could lead to big savings for the NHS and other healthcare services.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.