A new approach for breast abnormality detection based on thermography

Breast cancer is one of the most common women cancers in the world. In this paper, a new approach based on thermography for the early detection of breast abnormality is proposed. The study involved 80 breast thermograms collected from the PROENG public database which consists of 50 healthy breasts and 30 with some findings. Image processing techniques such as segmentation, texture analysis and mathematical morphology were used to train a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for automatic detection of breast abnormality. After conducting several tests, we obtained very interesting and motivating results. Indeed, our method  showed a high performance in terms of sensitivity of 93.3%, a specificity of 90% and an accuracy of 91.25%. The final results let us conclude that infrared thermography with the help of an adequate automatic classification algorithm can be a valuable and reliable complementary tool for radiologist in detecting breast cancer and thereby helping to reduce mortality rates

Detection of Breast Thermograms using Ensemble Classifiers

Mortality rate of breast cancer can be reduced by detecting breast cancer in its early stage. Breast thermography plays an important role in early detection of breast cancer, as it can detect tumors when the physiological changes start in the breast prior to structural changes. Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems improve the diagnostic accuracy by providing a detailed analysis of images, which are not visible to the naked eye. The performance of CAD systems depends on many factors. One of the important factors is the classifier used for classification of breast thermograms. In this paper, we made a comparison of classifier performances using two ensemble classifiers namely Ensemble Bagged Trees and AdaBoost. Spatial and spectral features are used for classification. Ensemble Bagged Trees classifier performed better than AdaBoost in terms of accuracy of classification, but training time required is higher than AdaBoost classifier. An accuracy of 87%, sensitivity of 83% and specificity of 90.6% is obtained using Ensemble Bagged Trees classifier

Higher order spectra analysis of breast thermograms for the automated identification of breast cancer

Breast cancer is a leading cancer affecting women worldwide. Mammography is a scanning procedure involvingX-rays of the breast. It causes discomfort and may cause high incidence of false negatives. Breast thermography is a new screening method of breast that helps in the early detection of cancer. It is a non-invasive imaging procedure that captures the infrared heat radiating off from the breast surface using an infrared camera. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the use of higher order spectral features extracted from thermograms in classifying normal and abnormal thermograms. For this purpose, we extracted five higher order spectral features and used them in a feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) classifier and a support vector machine (SVM). Fifty thermograms (25 each of normal and abnormal) were used for analysis.SVM presented a good sensitivity of 76% and specificity of 84%, and theANN classifier demonstrated higher values of sensitivity (92%) and specificity (88%). The proposed system, therefore, shows great promise in automatic classification of normal and abnormal breast thermograms without the need for subjective interpretation