Abstract
Common breast cancer treatment techniques, such as radiation therapy or the surgical removal of the axillary lymphatic nodes, result in several impairments in women’s upper-body function. These impairments include restricted shoulder mobility and arm swelling. As a consequence, several daily life activities are affected, which contribute to a decreased quality of life (QOL). Therefore, it is of extreme importance to assess the functional restrictions caused by cancer treatment, in order to evaluate the quality of procedures and to avoid further complications. Although the research in this field is still very limited and the methods currently available suffer from a lack of objectivity, this highlights the relevance of the pioneer work presented in this paper, which aims to develop an effective method for the evaluation of the upper-body function, suitable for breast cancer patients. For this purpose, the use of both depth and skeleton data, provided by the Microsoft Kinect, is investigated to extract features of the upper-limbs motion. Supervised classification algorithms are used to construct a predictive model of classification, and very promising results are obtained, with high classification accuracy.
Highlights
Breast cancer is the most common cancer both in developed and developing regions, representing a total of 23% [1]
This paper addresses the development of a Kinect-based system for the evaluation of the upper-body function
Despite its influence on patients’ quality of life (QOL), there is no clinical standard for the diagnosis of the decreased motion of upper-body function (UBF) caused by breast cancer treatment
Summary
Breast cancer is the most common cancer both in developed and developing regions, representing a total of 23% [1]. Due to effective earlier diagnosis methods and effective adjuvant therapies, the mortality rate is about 27% in the more developed regions [1] These high rates of long-term disease survival indicate that a large proportion of patients needs to live daily with the consequences of the treatment. About 25% of women diagnosed with breast cancer present cancer cells in the axillary lymph node system [2] In these cases, treatments can include the clearance of axillary lymph nodes or axillary radiotherapy. According to the study of Nesvold et al [4], at a five-year follow-up, the prevalence of arm/shoulder pain is 30% to 40%, of lymphedema 10% to 15% and of restricted arm/shoulder mobility 15% to 30% These upper-body morbidities are highly correlated with decreased QOL, since they disrupt valuable daily life activities [5]
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