The prototype DIET set-up

Dr Eli Van Houten of Canterbury University, talks about the DIET set up.

The DIET set-up consists of a few very inexpensive components. An actuator applies a steady vibrating motion to the phantom ‘breast’. The actuator plate the ‘breast’ sits on moves up and down very fast in a controlled manner. Four digital cameras surround the ‘breast’, and a strobe, which pulses light, allows still images to be taken from the moving ‘breast’ phantom. The images are fed into a computer system, which registers the motion information and controls the actuator, and the timing of the strobe and camera.

Transcript

DR ELI VAN HOUTEN
This is the prototype DIET system that we have built up in the lab at this time. This is the soft tissue gelatin phantom, and this is the actuator which is, sort of the heart of the DIET imaging process. This is what applies the motion to the sample or the tissue that we are trying to image. This plate here actually moves up and down vertically in a very tightly controlled manner. This is the digital camera array which captures the motion from the surface, in this case the phantom, or in a clinical case it would be the tissue. So these are four digital cameras that we have which each of them captures a 2D image of the surface and then we use computer programmes to convert that 2D image into a 3D description of the surface location. This is a standard strobe, which strobes lighting on to the phantom as it moves up and down to allow still images to be taken off of the moving phantom. And all this is powered and controlled by these amplifiers seen here. All the information from the cameras and from the actuator are fed into this computer system here which registers all the motion information and controls the actuation and the timing of the strobe and the camera system.