| In conjunction with Johnson Space Center Biomedical Hardware Engineering and Development Office, a hardware device was designed and built to test the validity of using skin impedance measurements to image intra-dermal lesions, such as the results of tuberculosis tests. This quantitative method of documenting intra-dermal lesions would replace the current subjective methods used. The hardware device developed consists of a reference signal source, a probe to send the reference signal across the skin and detect voltage magnitudes across an anomaly, a multiplexing and data acquisition system, and software routines for imaging the data. The multiplexing system uses boards designed to hold 16 Analog Devices ADG426 16-to-1 multiplexers. The DAQ board to acquire the data is a National Instrument AT-MIO-64E-3. The software used for processing and displaying the information is National Instruments LabVIEW.;The initial testing of the device indicated the concept of imaging sub-cutanious edema using the electrical characteristics of the skin achieved positive results. The final system is capable of sending a reference signal at a set frequency, obtaining data from a 16x16 conductor matrix probe covering a 28mm x 30mm area of skin in 0.7 seconds, calculating the voltage magnitude and phase information using a variety of calculation methods and displaying the data obtained in an intensity graph. |
