Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Open Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Sean Kirkpatrick

Committee Member 1

Smitha Malalur Nagaraja Rao

Committee Member 2

Saeid Nooshabadi

Abstract

The elastic and viscoelastic properties of skin are a reflection of its health. Measurement of these elastic properties can be used as the indicator of various pathologies. The measurement concept in our works is to mechanically stimulate the skin with a low frequency pneumatic force using non-invasive means of deflecting the skin and use laser speckle to study the elasticity of the skin.

The goal of this work was to develop a setup for in vivo optical elastography of skin. This setup includes an electro-mechanical device which is able to deliver a sinusoidal pneumatic stimulus equivalent to 10 grams of force from a distance of a few centimeters to skin, and a graphical user interface to monitor and control the storage of laser speckle motion on the skin. This thesis describes the hardware design and integrations and software programming of the setup as well as offering an introduction and theoretical overview of optical elastography.

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