Biomechanical analysis methods of soft tissue in the larynx

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The treatment of communication disorders is of high social and economic interest and relevance. New innovative medical strategies are needed to enable early diagnosis especially for cancer and eventually treat and rehabilitate people (patients) concerned.Today, diagnosis is often based on biopsies, where tissue samples from the larynx are taken and histologically analyzed. Due to the small size of the voice producing vocal folds, the biopsies are highly risky and are only conducted when inevitable. Early diagnosis or screening, as e.g. performed for breast cancer screening, is today not possible for the larynx.In our study, we suggest new methods allowing for laryngeal tissue analysis, enabling quantitative evaluation of tissue characteristics without injuring the tissue. These methods will yield important early diagnosis in tissue changes as seen in maligne (cancer) or benigne (polyps, cysts) tissue alterations. Our project deals with the design, implementation and evaluation of laboratory and clinical experiments for the analysis of vocal fold tissue characteristics. Measurement setups will be designed which allow for investigating at first in vitro cadaver larynges and in future in vivo human measurements during clinical examination. This will result in enabling biopsy free tissue analyses. The focus lies on innovative optical, laser based measurement setups for the analysis of biomechanical properties of soft tissue. The outcome of our approach will be an endoscopic method for biomechanical analysis of the focal fold. Supplementary to experiments with artificial tissue material, 50 experiments with cadaver larynges will be performed and statistically analyzed. Furthermore, we will open the field of laryngeal diagnosis for the otherwise well-established medical ultrasound. This will result in noninvasive ultrasonic vocal fold imaging. Assisted by medical doctors, we will show the feasibility and applicability of the new techniques for future clinical in vivo measurements.