A biomechanical comparison between tissue stiffness meter and shore type 00 durometer using fresh human fetal membrane cadavers

A manual palpation is traditionally used on soft tissue stiffness evaluation in clinical practices. However, the palpation is a subjective technique, so quantitative tissue stiffness measurement would be a more reliable method on diagnosing disorders instead of a palpation in medicine. The purpose of this study was to emphasize a new medical device that was capable of measuring soft tissue stiffness.An in vitro investigation with a soft tissue stiffness meter (STSM) was presented and it is compared with a shore type 00 durometer in this study. Soft materials were needed for in vitro experiments to show feasibility of the STSM, so fetal membranes were decided to use on experiments. Five fetal membranes undergoing normal birth (NB) (35 samples, 105 measurements) and four fetal membranes undergoing pre-term birth (PRB) (20 samples, 60 measurements) were collected immediately after delivery. Samples were examined on custom designed tissue holder.Resu*lts of the STSM were in correlation with results of the durometer for NB and PRB (r2 = 0.995 and r2 = 0.996 respectively). Moreover, a tissue stiffness difference between NB and PRB was statistically significant by using STSM (p ≤ 0.001), whereas it was not statistically significant by using durometer (p = 0.360).In conclusion, newly produced device, STSM is more sensitive than durometer even for very small stiffness differences as between NB and PRB fetal membranes.