thermogram Breast Cancer Detection : a comparative study of two machine learning techniques

Breast cancer is considered one of the major threats for women’s health all over the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that 1 in every 12 women could be subject to a breast abnormality during her lifetime. To increase survival rates, it is found that it is very effective to early detect breast cancer. Mammography-based breast cancer screening is the leading technology to achieve this aim. However, it still can not deal with patients with dense breast nor with tumor size less than 2 mm. Thermography-based breast cancer approach can address these problems. In this paper, a thermogram-based breast cancer detection approach is proposed. This approach consists of four phases: (1) Image Pre-processing using homomorphic filtering, top-hat transform and adaptive histogram equalization, (2) ROI Segmentation using binary masking and K-mean clustering, (3) feature extraction using signature boundary, and (4) classification in which two classifiers, Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), were used and compared. The proposed approach is evaluated using the public dataset, DMR-IR. Various experiment scenarios (e.g., integration between geometrical feature extraction, and textural features extraction) were designed and evaluated using different measurements (i.e., accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity). The results showed that ELM-based results were better than MLP-based ones with more than 19%

Thermography based breast cancer detection using texture features and minimum variance quantization

In this paper, we present a system based on feature extraction techniques and image segmentation techniques for detecting and diagnosing abnormal patterns in breast thermograms. The proposed system consists of three major steps: feature extraction, classification into normal and abnormal pattern and segmentation of abnormal pattern. Computed features based on Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrices (GLCM) are used to evaluate the effectiveness of textural information possessed by mass regions. A total of 20 GLCM features are extracted from thermograms. The ability of feature set in differentiating abnormal from normal tissue is investigated using a Support Vector Machine classifier, Naive Bayes classifier and K-Nearest Neighbor classifier. To evaluate the classification performance, five-fold cross validation method and Receiver operating characteristic analysis was performed. The verification results show that the proposed algorithm gives the best classification results using K-Nearest Neighbor classifier and a accuracy of 92.5 %. Image segmentation techniques can play an important role to segment and extract suspected hot regions of interests in the breast infrared images. Three image segmentation techniques: minimum variance quantization, dilation of image and erosion of image are discussed. The hottest regions of thermal breast images are extracted and compared to the original images. According to the results, the proposed method has potential to extract almost exact shape of tumors

Application of infrared thermography in computer aided diagnosis

The invention of thermography, in the 1950s, posed a formidable problem to the research community: What is the relationship between disease and heat radiation captured with Infrared (IR) cameras? The research community responded with a continuous effort to find this crucial relationship. This effort was aided by advances in processing techniques, improved sensitivity and spatial resolution of thermal sensors. However, despite this progress fundamental issues with this imaging modality still remain. The main problem is that the link between disease and heat radiation is complex and in many cases even non-linear. Furthermore, the change in heat radiation as well as the change in radiation pattern, which indicate disease, is minute. On a technical level, this poses high requirements on image capturing and processing. On a more abstract level, these problems lead to inter-observer variability and on an even more abstract level they lead to a lack of trust in this imaging modality. In this review, we adopt the position that these problems can only be solved through a strict application of scientific principles and objective performance assessment. Computing machinery is inherently objective; this helps us to apply scientific principles in a transparent way and to assess the performance results. As a consequence, we aim to promote thermography based Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. Another benefit of CAD systems comes from the fact that the diagnostic accuracy is linked to the capability of the computing machinery and, in general, computers become ever more potent. We predict that a pervasive application of computers and networking technology in medicine will help us to overcome the shortcomings of any single imaging modality and this will pave the way for integrated health care systems which maximize the quality of patient care

Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review of the Application of Machine Learning Classifiers in Biomedical Applications of Infrared Thermography

Atypical body temperature values can be an indication of abnormal physiological processes associated with several health conditions. Infrared thermal (IRT) imaging is an innocuous imaging modality capable of capturing the natural thermal radiation emitted by the skin surface, which is connected to physiology-related pathological states. The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) methods for interpretation of thermal data can be an interesting solution to supply a second opinion to physicians in a diagnostic/therapeutic assessment scenario. The aim of this work was to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis concerning different biomedical thermal applications in conjunction with machine learning strategies. The bibliographic search yielded 68 records for a qualitative synthesis and 34 for quantitative analysis. The results show potential for the implementation of IRT imaging with AI, but more work is needed to retrieve significant features and improve classification metrics.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An investigation of the breast cancer classification using various machine learning techniques

It is an extremely cumbersome process to predict a disease based on the visual diagnosis of cell type with precision or accuracy, especially when multiple features are associated. Cancer is one such example where the phenomenon is very complex and also multiple features of cell types are involved. Breast cancer is a disease mostly affects female population and the number of affected people is highest among all cancer types in India. In the present investigation, various pattern recognition techniques were used for the classification of breast cancer using cell image processing. Under these pattern recognition techniques, cell image segmentation, texture based image feature extraction and subsequent classification of breast cancer cells was successfully performed. When four different machine learning techniques: Kth nearest neighbor (KNN), Artificial Neural Network ( ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Least Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) was used to classify 81 cell images, it was observed from the results that the LS-SVM with both Radial Basis Function (RBF) and linear kernel classifiers demonstrated the highest classification rate of 95.3488% among four other classifiers while SVM with linear kernel resulted a classification rate of 93.02% which was close to LSSVM classifier. Thus, it was demonstrated that the LS-SVM classifier showed accuracy higher than other classifiers reported so far. Moreover, our classifier can classify the disease in a short period of time using only cell images unlike other approaches reported so far

Towards Dynamic Assessment of Healthy Breast Skin Temperature using Infrared Thermography

Breast skin temperature assessment has been of interest since of the first application of Infrared Thermography in Medicine in 1956. Since it many investigations attempted to appraise the method as a screening tool, although reference data is still lacking and dynamic thermal imaging has proved its value in other clinical applications. It is aim of this research to apply a thermal stimulus to the breasts of 11 healthy participants through thermal conduction and convection to determine, which can be feasible in clinical setup for further research involving breast cancer patients. It was found that the use of a conduction stimuli on the nipple for a 1 minute to be the most adequate method.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Thermal Characterization of Infrared Images for Breast Cancer Detection

One of the most common diseases affecting women is breast cancer. As a result, diagnosis and monitoring of breast health is viewed as a lifesaving procedure. Thermography shows promise for diagnosing breast cancer especially for dense breasts on which mammography does not work well. It is a noninvasive and inexpensive method based on the principle that malignant tumors have a higher metabolic rate and therefore emit more heat. A new segmentation algorithm was developed for a recent database of thermal images obtained from patients lying in the prone position. The algorithm was successful in isolating the breast from rest of the body and background. The resulting segmentation was then analyzed using temperature profiles, where significant peaks in the profile indicated a region of interest. Lastly, approximate hot spots were found that indicated the location of a possible tumor

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

Medical infrared thermal image based fatty liver classification using machine and deep learning

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) causes accumulation of excess fat in the liver affecting people who drink little to no alcohol. Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is an aggressive form of fatty liver disease (inflammation in the liver), may progress to cirrhosis and liver failure. Liver function tests, ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are used to help diagnose and monitor liver disease or damage. In this study, the feasibility of medical infrared thermal imaging (MITI) in automatic detection of NAFLD was investigated, and 167 MITI images (44 positive) from 32 patients (7 positive) were evaluated using image processing and classification methods. Convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and texture analysis methods were used in the feature selection phase. After feature selection and binary classification, the highest values from different setups for recall, f-score, specificity, accuracy, and area-under-curve (AUC) were 1.00, 1.00, 0.83, 1.0, 0.94, and 0.92, respectively. The highest values were achieved by CNN based methods on different datasets, however, texture analysis method performed lower. Here, it is shown that some of the CNN architectures have high potential on extracting features from thermal images. Finally, machine and deep learning approaches can be combined in detecting NAFLD using infrared thermal images