Lianna Kruger
The Sound of Pathology: Creating a Prototype to Enhance Breast Cancer Diagnosis
A.B. Lucas Secondary School
When you have an operation, the hospital laboratory makes a glass slide that a doctor looks at to make a diagnosis. Often they are looking for cancer. The problem is, there may be few cancer cells hidden amongst millions of normal cells. Sonification is the process of converting data into sound. Sonification has not been used in pathology for cancer diagnosis. In this project, I chose 15 slides of breast cancer and sonified the normal and cancer cells. Three prototypes were created by varying the instruments and parameters used to create each slide’s soundtrack. Ten listeners were surveyed to determine if they could detect the transition between normal and cancer cells. Overall, my third prototype had the best results and participants had 87% accuracy of detecting when cancer first appears in a slide. This novel tool may give pathologists a multisensory approach to diagnosing breast cancer in the future.
Silver Medal
University Scholarships
Mount Alison University
Western University