A computing platform to analyze breast abnormalities using infrared images.

Abstract

The present work shows a computational tool developed in the MATLAB platform. Its main functionality is to evaluate a thermal model of the breast. This computational infrastructure consists of modules in which manipulate the infrared images and calculate breast temperature profiles. It also allows the analysis of breast nodules. The different modules of the framework are interconnected through an interface which the major purpose is to automatize the whole process of the infrared image analysis, in a quick and organized way. The tool is initially supplied with a three-dimensional mesh that represents the substitute geometry of the patient's breast together with her infrared images which are transformed into temperature matrices. Through these matrices, the frontal and lateral mappings are performed by specified modules. This process generates an image and a text file with all the temperatures associated to the nodes of the surface mesh. The developed tool is also able to manage the use of a commercial mesh generation program and a computational fluid dynamics code, the FLUENT, in order to validate the technique by the use of a parametric analysis. In these analyses, the tumor may have several geometric shapes and different locations within the breast.