A portable breast cancer detection system based on smartphone with infrared camera

Abstract

The traditional detection methods have the disadvantages of radiation exposure, high cost, and shortage of medical resources, which restrict the popularity of early screening for breast cancer. An inexpensive, accessible, and friendly way to detect is urgently needed. Infrared thermography, an emerging means to breast cancer detection, is extremely sensitive to tissue abnormalities caused by inflammation and vascular proliferation. In this work, combined with the temperature and texture features, we designed a breast cancer detection system based on smart phone with infrared camera, achieving the accuracy of 99.21 % with the k-Nearest Neighbor classifier. We compared the diagnostic results of the low resolution, originated from the phone camera, with the high resolution of the conventional infrared camera. It was found that the accuracy and sensitivity decreased slightly, but both of them were over than 98 %. The proposed breast cancer detection system not only has excellent performance but also dramatically saves the detection cost, and its prospect will be fascinating.