Feasibility study of breast cancer risk monitoring using thermography technique in Malaysia

Breast cancer remains as a serious health issue in Malaysia and most presentation of breast cancer incidences are at the later stage which will reduce the survival rate. Breast Self-Examination for all women (BSE), Clinical Breast Examination for women above 40 years old (CBE) and Mammography for the older and high-risk groups are the current policies that are available in the government hospitals and selected clinics. However, BSE and CBE could not detect the early stage breast cancer while Mammography is less sensitive in detecting tumor in high dense breast tissue. Both factors have caused an increase in the overall percentage of later stage presentation of breast cancer in Malaysia. In this paper, a feasibility study of breast cancer screening and risk monitoring using Thermography technique is presented. Thermography technique is capable in identifying any physiological changes occur prior to lump formation. This technique is simple, cheaper, and produce no radiation which will allow a safe regular screening. In this study, a series of screenings has been performed on carcinogenic induced rats and thermal images acquired were then analyzed for risk monitoring. Visual analysis shown that the presence of hotspot and asymmetrical temperature profile could be an indicator of a high risk patient while temperature measurement on both induced and control groups shows a significant difference in standard deviation of the surface temperature with smaller deviation of 0.31±0.08 observed in control group while bigger deviation of 2.23±0.78 observed in the induced group. Hence, it is shown that Thermography technique could be a potential modality for upfront breast screening in Malaysi

A feasibility study of ultrasound as a monitoring method for hyperthermia therapy

Hyperthermia therapy is one of the therapy method used for cancer treatment. It has shown to be an effective way of treating the cancerous tissue when compared to surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. However, hyperthermia needs a real time monitoring method in ensuring a consistent heat delivery and preventing any damages to the nearby tissue. Ultrasound is one of the modalities that have great potential for local hyperthermia monitoring, as it is nonionizing, convenient, and has relatively simple signal processing requirement compared to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT). B-Mode ultrasound provides sufficient temperature sensitivity and yields good spatial resolution for thermal monitoring meanwhile A Mode ultrasound involves only one-dimensional (1D) signal processing which enables a quantitative measurement on different types of breast tissues to be conducted faster. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate and to compare the most optimum ultrasound temperature dependent's parameters in normal and pathological breast tissue between A-Mode and B-Mode ultrasound which involve the measurement of the attenuation and backscatter coefficients for A-Mode and determination of pixels value and standard deviation for B-Mode. For this purpose, a series of experiment was conducted on 40 female Sprague Dawley rats in which 30 pathological rats were used as infected study while 10 of healthy rats were group as control purposes. The pathological and normal rats were dissected and exposed to hyperthermia at 40°C, 45°C, 50°C and 55°C. Meanwhile, at 37°C was used as normal body temperature before hyperthermia. A-Mode and B-Mode of 7.5Mhz and 6Mhz was used simultaneously before, during and after the hyperthermia exposure. Result obtained shows that, for A-Mode, in both normal and infected tissue, the temperature value of 45°C was chosen to be an optimum temperature dependent for attenuation calculation and temperature value of 40°C was selected for backscatter energy. In B-Mode analysis, based on pixel values calculation of segmented area, result shows in normal tissues where the temperature value of 40°C was chosen, the standard deviation of 11.779 was obtained. Meanwhile for infected tissue condition, at 50°C the standard deviation value shown to be 7.95 as compared to the others temperature. Therefore, it is shown that, a combination of both A-Mode and B-Mode ultrasound can be used as another potential approach since its attenuation and backscatter coefficient of A-Mode, the pixels value and standard deviation of B-Mode is very sensitive to the tissue structure in monitoring hyperthermia therapy with respect to the changes of temperature

A Comprehensive Review of the Recent Developments in Wearable Sweat-Sensing Devices

Sweat analysis offers non-invasive real-time on-body measurement for wearable sensors. However, there are still gaps in current developed sweat-sensing devices (SSDs) regarding the concerns of mixing fresh and old sweat and real-time measurement, which are the requirements to ensure accurate the measurement of wearable devices. This review paper discusses these limitations by aiding model designs, features, performance, and the device operation for exploring the SSDs used in different sweat collection tools, focusing on continuous and non-continuous flow sweat analysis. In addition, the paper also comprehensively presents various sweat biomarkers that have been explored by earlier works in order to broaden the use of non-invasive sweat samples in healthcare and related applications. This work also discusses the target analyte’s response mechanism for different sweat compositions, categories of sweat collection devices, and recent advances in SSDs regarding optimal design, functionality, and performance