Soft Tissue Surrogates on a Teaching Budget
Commercial ultrasound phantoms are excellent—and expensive enough that a fourteen-person cohort cannot each own one. Our biomaterials weekends therefore mix kitchen-scale recipes with a small shared set of purchased sheets.
A gelatin–glycerol block can approximate soft tissue stiffness for basic indentation tests if you control water content and curing time. Students learn more from failing a batch and remaking it than from a perfect commercial brick that never changes.
Silicone sheets earn their keep when the exercise needs tear resistance or suture practice. We keep those sheets in a locked cupboard and issue them by weight so leftovers return to stock.
Spend scarce budget on calibrated load cells and micrometers before you spend it on photogenic phantoms. Measurement quality, not material prestige, is what employers ask about.