The role of malignant tissue on the thermal distribution of cancerous breast

Abstract

The present work focuses on the integration of analytical and numerical strategies to investigate the thermal distribution of cancerous breasts. Coupled stationary bioheat transfer equations are considered for the glandular and heterogeneous tumor regions, which are characterized by different thermophysical properties. The cross-section of the cancerous breast is identified by a homogeneous glandular tissue that surrounds the heterogeneous tumor tissue, which is assumed to be a two-phase periodic composite with non-overlapping circular inclusions and a square lattice distribution, wherein the constituents exhibit isotropic thermal conductivity behavior. Asymptotic periodic homogenization method is used to find the effective properties in the heterogeneous region. The tissue effective thermal conductivities are computed analytically and then used in the homogenized model, which is solved numerically. Results are compared with appropriate experimental data reported in the literature. In particular, the tissue scale temperature profile agrees with experimental observations. Moreover, as a novelty result we find that the tumor volume fraction in the heterogeneous zone influences the breast surface temperature.

A Review on Recent Progress in Thermal Imaging and Deep Learning Approaches for Breast Cancer Detection

“…As discussed in [52], changes in temperature distribution are a symptom of abnormality in body tissues. A study also confirm that the thermal distribution of cancerous breast and tumor volume fraction in the heterogeneous zone influences the breast surface temperature [53]. However, given the limitations of the human visual system such temperature differences are difficult to detect.…”

Geometria substituta de mama baseada na retirada manual de curvas de termogramas para estimativa de parâmetros termofísicos mamários

“…Costuma ser menos sensível na detecção de tumores em mulheres com tecido mamário denso. Devido à compressão durante a realização da mamografia, existe o risco de ruptura do encapsulamento do tumor [Ramírez-Torres et al, 2017].…”

“…É útil para mulheres de todas as idades e em condições diferentes, como gravidez, implantes, seios densos ou fibrocísticos [Avila-Castro et al, 2017]. A detecção do câncer é justificada pela neoangiogênese causada pela neoplasia, que pode provocar um aumento na temperatura na região próxima ao tumor [Ramírez-Torres et al, 2017].…”

Effective balance equations for elastic composites subject to inhomogeneous potentials

“…We then apply the asymptotic homogenization technique via formal expansions and by adopting a strong form formulation approach (see [43,44]), which has been recently enforced also to investigate various problems of practical interest such as bone modeling [46], filter efficiency [14], cardiac electrical activity [48], transport, growth, and heat exchange in tumors ( [27,40,41,42,45,47,54]). We admit both macroscale and microscale variations of the elastic coefficients of the individual phases of the composite, as well as possible discontinuities of the elastic moduli across the interface between two different phases.…”