An Experimental Framework for Validation of Thermal Modeling for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

In recent years, breast cancer is considered as one of the most predominant causes of death among women in the world. This also accounts for the 11.7 % of the total cancers diagnosed among ladies in Kazakhstan. The survival chances of the patients can significantly be improved if the disease is detected at its earliest stage. At the present time, mammography is found to be the most common technique for the purpose of detecting the breast cancer. However, this method is very expensive, and the diagnostic ability of this imaging technique fails when it comes to the detection of tumours of small sizes, in addition to its harmful side effect. The IR thermography is inexpensive without any harmful side effect, and promises to be more precise than conventional techniques of detecting breast cancer at its earlier stage. In this study we propose a comprehensive method that includes FEM modelling based on heat transfer principles and requires 3D scanning and IR imaging for disease diagnosis. Here we report the first part of our study, which develops an experimental procedure to generate experimental results for the validation of FEM models for the simulation and detection of breast cancer.