An Augmented Reality Application for Clinical Breast Examination Training

Clinical breast examinations (CBE) are physical exams of breasts done by healthcare providers to detect and screen for breast cancers. They play an important role in the early detection of breast cancer. Performing CBE has been limited due to the lack of training available to healthcare professionals. In this paper, we describe our development of a training simulator that combines hardware-based and augmented reality (AR) technology to train and evaluate medical providers on CBE skills. The AR application contains two modules: one is used to visualize breast deformation and the other supports visualization of the palpation force applied by the user on the breast phantom.