Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Ouro Preto, Rua Professor Paulo Magalhães Gomes, Ouro Preto 35400000, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
School of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Uberlandia, Uberlandia 38408-100, Brazil.
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2019 Apr;172:65-77. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2019.02.004. Epub 2019 Feb 12.
Breast cancer is the second most common type of cancer among women after nonmelanoma skin cancer. Use of mammography, the main method to diagnose the disease, has several limitations in parts of the population. The primary goal of this work was to detect and localize the geometric centers of mammary tumors using only superficial temperatures of the breast skin. The 2D anatomic geometry of the breast was simulated using the commercial software COMSOL to obtain the distribution of skin temperature in the three main types of breast cancer. Random errors of ± 2% were added to the simulated temperatures. The temperature variation caused by each type of cancer on the healthy tissue was correlated with auxiliary temperature profiles. These auxiliary temperature profiles were obtained with no prior knowledge of the thermophysical properties of the tumor apart from the mean values for thermal conductivity and blood perfusion of the layers of healthy breast tissue. The results showed that the maximum error for geometric center estimation was 0.32 cm for invasive lobular carcinoma, with a diameter of 1 cm, positioned 5 cm from the skin surface. Thus, this work contributes to studies aiming to improve the use of infrared thermography for early breast cancer diagnosis, as the results showed that localization of tumors using only superficial temperature profiles does not require prior knowledge of the thermophysical properties of the tissues.
乳腺癌是女性中仅次于非黑色素瘤皮肤癌的第二大常见癌症。在某些人群中，使用乳房 X 光摄影术（诊断该病的主要方法）存在一些局限性。这项工作的主要目标是仅使用乳房皮肤的表面温度来检测和定位乳腺肿瘤的几何中心。使用商业软件 COMSOL 模拟乳房的 2D 解剖几何形状，以获得三种主要类型乳腺癌的皮肤温度分布。对模拟温度添加了随机误差为 ±2%。每种癌症对健康组织造成的温度变化与辅助温度曲线相关联。这些辅助温度曲线是在不了解肿瘤热物理特性的情况下获得的，仅使用健康乳房组织各层的热导率和血液灌注的平均值。结果表明，对于直径为 1 厘米、距皮肤表面 5 厘米的浸润性小叶癌，几何中心估计的最大误差为 0.32 厘米。因此，这项工作有助于提高红外热成像在早期乳腺癌诊断中的应用，因为结果表明，仅使用表面温度曲线来定位肿瘤不需要对组织的热物理特性有先验知识。
