Abstract
This research is aimed at the early detection of breast cancer. Breast cancer is a form of cancer that is found in the breast tissue. Though mostly common in women, research has shown that it can also be diagnosed in men. The increasing trend in the mortality rate attributable to breast cancer can be traced to inefficient methods of detecting the cancer in its early stage. Current methods involve invasion, exposure of the patient to radiation, and/or compressing the breast. These may cause pain or even invest patient with other forms of ailments. In this work, infrared (IR) thermography has been deployed to detect breast cancer in its early stage. IR thermography uses IR radiation to measure heat patterns of human skin. It is passive in nature and it neither emit harmful radiation nor subject the patient to further risks. The thermograms captured by infrared camera are analysed by a software in stages, viz: extraction of region of interest, detection and masking of warm region among others. The resulting image in grayscale is sampled by comparing the white pixels (warm region) to the dark pixels (cool region). The software subsequently compares the outcome with a predefined threshold to predict the chances of occurrence of cancer and displays result for further diagnosis by medical expert. Our proposed modality is cost effective, safe and user friendly.
Highlights
Breast cancer is a type of cancer that develops from the breast tissues comprising of lobules and the ducts that connect lobules to the nipple
Thermography can be a first indicator of the pathogenesis of cancer since in many cases it takes between 4 and 10 years before it can be detected by any other method, mammography inclusive (Shah et al, 2011)
This study investigated early detection of breast cancer as panacea for cancer induced deaths especially in women diagnosed with the disease
Summary
Breast cancer is a type of cancer that develops from the breast tissues comprising of lobules and the ducts that connect lobules to the nipple. Infrared (IR) thermography uses thermal imager to capture the IR radiation and measures the heat pattern of the object surface, human skin inclusive. It neither emit harmful radiation nor subject the patient to any risk (Egorov and Sarvazyan, 2008). For a cell to become cancerous, its surrounding tissues start to create new blood vessels (Mohamed, et al, 2014). Infrared thermography has the ability to detect the temperature or more importantly, map out the hot spots associated with chemical and angiogenetic vessels both in precancerous as well as the cancerous breast tissue (Hankare, 2006; Lodish et al, 2000). The algorithm was selected because the gradient operator works on both x and y axis while some algorithms work in just one direction
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