Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent causes of death among women across the globe. Early detection is the best strategy for reducing the mortality rate. Currently, mammography is the standard screening modality, which has its shortcomings. To complement this modality, thermal infrared-based Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CADx) tools have been presented as economical, less hazardous, and a suitable solution for various age groups. Although a viable solution, most CADx systems are built primarily from frontal breast thermograms, and are likely to miss lesions that may develop on the sides. Additionally, these systems often disregard critical clinical data, such as risk factors. This paper presents a novel CADx system that utilizes deep learning techniques for breast cancer detection. The system incorporates multiple breast thermogram views and corresponding patient clinical data to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. We describe the methodology of the system, including the extraction of regions of interest from images and the use of transfer learning to train three different models. We evaluate the performance of the models and compare them to similar works from the literature. The results demonstrate that using multi-inputs outperforms single-input models and achieves an overall accuracy of 90.48%, a sensitivity of 93.33%, and an AUROC curve of 0.94. This approach could offer a more cost-effective and less hazardous screening option for breast cancer detection, particularly for a wide range of age groups.

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women. Its aggressive nature has made it one of the chief factors of high female mortality. Therefore, this has motivated research to achieve early diagnosis since it is the best strategy for patient survival. Currently, mammography is the gold standard for detecting breast cancer. However, it is expensive, unsuitable for dense breasts, and an invasive process that exposes the patient to radiation. Infrared thermography is gaining popularity as a screening modality for the early detection of breast cancer. It is a noninvasive and cost-effective modality that allows health practitioners to observe the temperature profile of the breast region for signs of cancerous tumors. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful computational tool for the early detection of breast cancer in radiology. As such, this study presents a review that shows existing work on deep learning-based Computer-aided Diagnosis (CADx) systems for breast cancer detection. In the same context, it reflects on classification utilizing breast thermograms. It first provides an overview of infrared thermography, details on available breast thermogram datasets, and then segmentation techniques applied to these thermograms. We also provide a brief overview of deep neural networks. Finally, it reviews works adopting Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for breast thermogram classification.