Early Detection of Cancer Using Smartphones

Abstract

Cancer disease is the second largest disease in the world with high death mortality. Cancer is an abnormal growth of a normal cell. There are more than 100 types of cancer like blood cancer, brain cancer, small intestine cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, etc. The type of cancer can be classified by the type of cell which is initially affected. When cancer grows it does not show any symptom. The symptom will appear when the cancer cell grows in mass and the symptom of cancer depends on the type of cancer. The cause of cancers is environmental pollutants, food habits, inherited genetics, tobacco, stress, etc., but in practice, it is not possible to prove the cause of cancer since various cancers do not have specific fingerprints. After the heart attack, cancer is a second killer disease in India. The death mortality is high in cancer because in most of the cases it is identified at the final stage which causes more death. According to ICMR, among 1.27 billion Indian populations, the incidence of cancer is 70-90 per 100,000 populations and 70% of cancer is identified in the last stage accounting for high morality. There are many types of treatment to treat cancer and they are surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, hormone therapy, stem cell transplant, etc. All cancer treatments will have side effects and the treatments will help only if the cancer cells are identified at the early stage. So time factor is important in diagnosing of cancer cells; hence, early detection of cancer will reduce the mortality rate. This chapter proposed the early detection of cancer cells using image processing techniques by the structure of circulating tumor cell. Early detection of cancer cells is very difficult because the concentration of cancer cells are extremely small and about one million malignant cell is encountered per billion of healthy cells. The circulating tumor cells, CTC, are shed into the bloodstream as a tumor grows, and it is believed these cells initiate the spread of cancer. CTC are rare, existing as only a few per one billion blood cells, and a highly efficient technology like chip-based biosensor platforms is required to capture the CTC, which in turn helps to detect cancer cell at an early stage before spreading. In proposed method, the circulating tumor cell has used a marker to detect cancer at early stage.