An automated method for the evaluation of breast cancer using infrared thermography

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the major causes of death for women. Temperature measurement is advantageous because it is non-invasive, non-destructive, and cost-effective. Temperature measurement through infrared thermography is useful to detect changes in blood perfusion that can occur due to inflammation, angiogenesis, or other pathological causes. In this work, we analyzed 206 thermograms of patients with suspected breast cancer, using a classification method, in which thermal asymmetries were computed, the most vascularized areas of each breast were extracted and compared; then these two metrics were added to yield a thermal score, indicative of thermal anomalies. The classification method based on this thermal score allowed us to obtain the test sensitivity of 100 %, specificity of 68.68 %; a positive predictive value of 11.42 % and negative predictive value of 100 %. These results highlight the potential of thermography imaging as adjunctive tool to mammography in breast cancer screening.