Thermography as a Breast Cancer Screening Technique: A Review Article

Abstract

Globally, breast cancer is the most frequently occurring cancer in women and is the reason for more disability-adjusted life years lost than any other type of cancer. Hence, early screening plays a vital role in reducing breast cancer mortality. Although mammography is the standard procedure used for screening and diagnosis of breast cancer, it still has some limitations. Other methods used for screening include ultrasound and clinical breast examination. Despite its limitations, mammography is the gold standard for screening breast malignancy. Another emerging method for screening is thermography. With recent technological advances, breast cancer screening through thermography has demonstrated several advantages over existing modalities. For this review, a literature search was performed using databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect. The keywords searched included breast cancer, early detection, breast cancer screening, mammography, and thermography. This review discusses the benefits of thermography showing that it can be a significant modality for breast cancer screening. The recent developments in thermal sensors, imaging protocols, and computer-aided software diagnostics hold great promise for making this technique a mainstream screening method for cancer. Moreover, the use of artificial intelligence and thermal imaging to detect early-stage breast cancer can provide impressive results. Therefore, thermography will be a promising technology for the early detection of breast cancer.

Infrared thermography for normal endothelial function screening

“…Nevertheless, currently, there is evidence of its good performance. 33,34 Thermography has already been included in the evaluation of vascular pathologies. In a study of thermography for thyroid nodules, Damião et al 35 found that malignant nodules have higher temperatures than their benign counterparts (33.46 °C vs. 33.01 °C).…”

Artificial Intelligence based breast thermography using radiomic feature extraction versus conventional manual interpretation of breast thermograms in the prediction of breast cancer: a multi-reader study

“…This mirrors the trend in the field of digital mammography, wherein the use of machine learning algorithms for extracting, detecting, characterizing and classifying radiomics features of mammograms has shown clinical benefit and are extensively used [23]. AI-enhanced breast thermography uses similar principles and is currently being re-evaluated at various centers as an ancillary modality in the screening and diagnosis of breast disease (24,25). In this paper, we have compared the performance of an automated breast thermography interpretation tool called Thermalytix that uses a combination of domain knowledge and data analytics for interpretation of thermal images, with the manual interpretation of the thermal images by an expert thermologist in the detection of breast cancers.…”

“…The algorithm then classifies the datasets and obtains a final result. The combination of modern cameras and advanced algorithms is the basis for the renewed interest in thermography to detect breast cancer (24,25).…”

Termografía infrarroja en la detección de la función endotelial normal

“…Sin embargo, actualmente existe evidencia de su buen desempeño. 33,34 La termografía ya se ha incluido en la evaluación de patologías vasculares. En un estudio sobre termografía en nódulos tiroideos, Damião et al 35 encontraron que los nódulos malignos tienen temperaturas más altas que los benignos (33.46 °C versus 33.01 °C).…”