Physical breast model design for contact thermography

Abstract

Researches prove that contact thermography can be used in medical imaging of breast pathologies. Pathological lesions suspected of being malignancy are morphologically characteristic, showing higher temperatures than healthy places do. For validation and verification purposes of contact thermography applications as well as thermograms interpretation algorithms development, a simplified physical breast model was designed and constructed. Model provides different thermal surface reaction based on activation particular local heat sources which can be observed on the surface of liquid crystal foils as a specific colorful maps. The breast model is able to simulate different breast types and several breast pathologies as well.