Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women globally, and the number of young women diagnosed with this disease is gradually increasing over the years. Mammography is the current gold-standard technique although it is known to be less sensitive in detecting tumors in woman with dense breast tissue. Detecting an early-stage tumor in young women is very crucial for better survival chance and treatment. The thermography technique has the capability to provide an additional functional information on physiological changes to mammography by describing thermal and vascular properties of the tissues. Studies on breast thermography have been carried out to improve the accuracy level of the thermography technique in various perspectives. However, the limitation of gathering women affected by cancer in different age groups had necessitated this comprehensive study which is aimed to investigate the effect of different density levels on the surface temperature distribution profile of the breast models. These models, namely extremely dense (ED), heterogeneously dense (HD), scattered fibroglandular (SF), and predominantly fatty (PF), with embedded tumors were developed using the finite element method. A conventional Pennes' bioheat model was used to perform the numerical simulation on different case studies, and the results obtained were then compared using a hypothesis statistical analysis method to the reference breast model developed previously. The results obtained show that ED, SF, and PF breast models had significant mean differences in surface temperature profile with a p value <0.025, while HD breast model data pair agreed with the null hypothesis formulated due to the comparable tissue composition percentage to the reference model. The findings suggested that various breast density levels should be considered as a contributing factor to the surface thermal distribution profile alteration in both breast cancer detection and analysis when using the thermography technique.

Recently, there is an increasing interest in the use of local hyperthermia treatment for a variety of clinical applications. The desired therapeutic outcome in local hyperthermia treatment is achieved by raising the local temperature to surpass the tissue coagulation threshold, resulting in tissue necrosis. In oncology, local hyperthermia is used as an effective way to destroy cancerous tissues and is said to have the potential to replace conventional treatment regime like surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy. However, the inability to closely monitor temperature elevations from hyperthermia treatment in real time with high accuracy continues to limit its clinical applicability. Local hyperthermia treatment requires real-time monitoring system to observe the progression of the destroyed tissue during and after the treatment. Ultrasound is one of the modalities that have great potential for local hyperthermia monitoring, as it is non-ionizing, convenient and has relatively simple signal processing requirement compared to magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography. In a two-dimensional ultrasound imaging system, changes in tissue microstructure during local hyperthermia treatment are observed in terms of pixel value analysis extracted from the ultrasound image itself. Although 2D ultrasound has shown to be the most widely used system for monitoring hyperthermia in ultrasound imaging family, 1D ultrasound on the other hand could offer a real-time monitoring and the method enables quantitative measurement to be conducted faster and with simpler measurement instrument. Therefore, this paper proposes a new local hyperthermia monitoring method that is based on one-dimensional ultrasound. Specifically, the study investigates the effect of ultrasound attenuation in normal and pathological breast tissue when the temperature in tissue is varied between 37 and 65 °C during local hyperthermia treatment. Besides that, the total protein content measurement was also conducted to investigate the relationship between attenuation and tissue denaturation level at different temperature ranges. The tissues were grouped according to their histology results, namely normal tissue with large predominance of cells (NPC), cancer tissue with large predominance of cells (CPC) and cancer with high collagen fiber content (CHF). The result shows that the attenuation coefficient of ultrasound measured following the local hyperthermia treatment increases with the increment of collagen fiber content in tissue as the CHF attenuated ultrasound at the highest rate, followed by NPC and CPC. Additionally, the attenuation increment is more pronounced at the temperature over 55 °C. This describes that the ultrasound wave experienced more energy loss when it propagates through a heated tissue as the tissue structure changes due to protein coagulation effect. Additionally, a significant increase in the sensitivity of attenuation to protein denaturation is also observed with the highest sensitivity obtained in monitoring NPC. Overall, it is conclude...

An external fixator is normally used by medical surgeons in treating subtalar dislocation due to its biomechanical characteristics that can providing an adequate stability, preventing deformity (mal-union and non-union), reduce rate of infections, and promoting fast healing process as compared to coventional internal fixator. Apart from the configurations and fixation techniques, previous studies has mentioned that the stability of external fixator can be altered and manipulated by using different materials, e.g. stainless steel, titanium alloy and polymer. To be noted, the current available research works that have been investigated on different materials of external fixator are still lacking, therefore, the present study is aims to conduct related study. The main objective of the research work is to simulate finite element model of foot and ankle joint associated with open subtalar dislocation in which treated with Mitkovic external fixator by using two different material properties; titanium alloy (Model 1) and stainless steel (Model 2). The three-dimensional model of foot and ankle joint were reconstructed using images of CT dataset. For the soft tissues, cartilages at the ankle joint were developed by offsetting the bone surfaces with 1 mm thickness while ligaments were modelled with linear links. Homogeneous and isotropic properties were assigned to the bone, Mooney-Rivlin model for cartilage and specific stiffness value for ligaments. In order to simulate stance phase during walking condition, an axial load of 350 N was applied to the proximal tibia bone. The results of von Mises stress demonstrated that Model 2 has a low magnitude (127 MPa) at the pin-bone interface of tibia bone, compared with Model 1 (369 MPa). As for the local displacement at the bony segment of fibula, Model 2 (3.3 mm) indicated high stability of the external fixator than Model 1 (7.4 mm). In conclusion, the use of stainless steel material for Mitkovic external fixator can provide adequate stability and optimum stress distribution.

Muscle fatigue in sports science is an established research area where various techniques and types of muscles have been studied in order to understand the fatigue condition. It can be used as an indicator for predicting muscle injury and other muscle problems which can decrease athletes’ performance. Muscle fatigue usually occurs after a long lasting or repeated muscular activity. Electromyography (EMG) assessment method is a standard tool used to evaluate muscle fatigue based on the signals from the neuromuscular activation during fatigue condition. However, additional time for equipment set up such as placement of the electrodes and the use of multiple wires make this overall setting a bit complicated. In addition, the signal from EMG which possessed some noise, need to be filtered and post processing time is also required to obtain a reliable measurement signal. Therefore, researchers have explored the application of thermal imaging technique as one of the alternative methods for muscle fatigue assessment. The objective of this study is to investigate the correlation of muscle fatigue condition measured using a non-invasive infrared thermal imaging technique and a standard evaluation method, EMG. Five healthy men were selected to run on a treadmill for 30 minutes with a constant speed setting. Temperature and EMG signals were registered from gastrocnemius muscle of the subjects' dominant leg simultaneously. Result obtained shows that the average temperature of gastrocnemius muscle decrease as subjects start to exercise. Further temperature decrease along with exercise and increase in temperature were observed during the recovery period. Statistical analysis was performed and analyzed using both temperature and EMG parameters. Result shows a significant strong correlation with r = 0.7707 and p < 0.05 between temperature difference and median frequency (MDF) for all subjects compared to average temperature. Therefore, it is concluded that temperature difference extracted from thermal images can be used as an ideal parameter for muscle fatigue evaluation.

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 Malaysia.