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Breast cancer is a serious potential health problem for all women and is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. The current screening procedures and imaging techniques, including x-ray mammography, clinical biopsy, ultrasound imaging, and magnetic resonance imaging, provide only 73% accuracy in detecting breast cancer. This gives the impetus to explore alternate techniques for imaging the breast and detecting early stage tumors. Among the complementary methods, the noninvasive biomagnetic breast imaging is attractive and promising, because both ionizing radiation and breast compressions that the prevalent x-ray mammography suffers from are avoided. It furthermore offers very high contrast because of the significant electromagnetic properties' differences between the cancerous, benign, and normal breast tissues. In this paper, a hybrid and accurate modeling tool for biomagnetic breast imaging is developed, which couples the electromagnetic and ultrasonic energies, and initial validations between the model predication and experimental findings are conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear ultrasound was used to monitor radiation damage in two reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels. The microstructural changes associated with radiation damage include changes in dislocation density and the formation of precipitates, and nonlinear ultrasonic waves are known to be sensitive to such changes. Six samples each of two different RPV steels were previously irradiated in the Rheinsberg power reactor to two fluence levels, up to 1020 n/cm2 (E > 1 MeV). Longitudinal waves were used to measure the acoustic nonlinearity in these samples, and the results show a clear increase in the measured acoustic nonlinearity from the unirradiated state to the medium dose, and then a decrease from medium dose to high dose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]