Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, India.
J Med Syst. 2020 Jul 1;44(8):136. doi: 10.1007/s10916-020-01581-y.
Breast cancer is not preventable. To reduce the death rate and improve the survival chances of breast cancer patients, early and accurate detection is the only panacea. Delay in diagnosis of this disease causes 60% of deaths. Thermal imaging is a low-risk modality for early breast cancer decision making without injecting any form of energy into the human body. Thermography as a screening tool was first introduced and well accepted in 1956. However, a study in 1977 found that it lagged behind other screening tools and is subjective. Soon after, its use was discontinued. This review discusses various screening tools used to detect breast cancer with a focus on thermography along with their advantages and shortcomings. With the maturation of thermography equipment and technological advances, this technique is emerging and has become the refocus of many biomedical researchers across the globe in the past decade. This study dispenses an exhaustive review of the work done related to interpretation of breast thermal variations and confers the discipline, frameworks, and methodologies used by different authors to diagnose breast cancer. Different performance metrics like accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity have also been examined. This paper outlines the most pressing research gaps for future work to improvise the accuracy of results for diagnosis of breast abnormalities using image processing tools, mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence. However, supplementary research is needed to affirm the potential of this technology for predicting breast cancer risk effectively. Altogether, our findings inform that it is a promising research problem and a potential solution for early detection of breast cancer in younger women.
乳腺癌是不可预防的。为了降低乳腺癌死亡率和提高患者的生存率，早期准确的检测是唯一的良药。这种疾病的诊断延误导致 60%的死亡。热成像作为一种无需向人体注入任何形式能量的早期乳腺癌决策的低风险方式。热成像作为一种筛查工具，于 1956 年首次被引入并被广泛接受。然而，1977 年的一项研究发现，它落后于其他筛查工具，且具有主观性。不久之后，它的使用就被停止了。本综述讨论了用于检测乳腺癌的各种筛查工具，重点介绍了热成像技术及其优缺点。随着热成像设备的成熟和技术的进步，这项技术正在兴起，并在过去十年中成为全球许多生物医学研究人员的关注焦点。本研究对与解释乳房热变化相关的工作进行了详尽的回顾，并介绍了不同作者用于诊断乳腺癌的学科、框架和方法。还检查了不同的性能指标，如准确性、特异性和敏感性。本文概述了最紧迫的研究差距，以通过图像处理工具、数学建模和人工智能来提高使用该技术诊断乳房异常的结果的准确性。然而，需要进行补充研究来证实该技术在有效预测乳腺癌风险方面的潜力。总之，我们的研究结果表明，这是一个很有前景的研究问题，也是一种早期发现年轻女性乳腺癌的潜在解决方案。
