Thermography-based breast cancer screening using a measure of symmetry

A system for breast cancer screening using a measure of symmetry extracted from a thermographic image of a left and right breast of a patient, the system comprising:

• a storage device;
• and
• a processor in communication with the storage device, the processor retrieving executing machine readable program instructions which, when executed by the processor, enable the processor to:
• receive at least one thermographic image of a left and right breast of a patient;
• analyze the thermographic image to determine whether a hot spot exists in each of a left breast and a right breast, a hot spot comprising a patch of pixels with an elevated temperature with respect to a temperature of pixels in surrounding tissue;
• and
• in response to a hot spot being identified in each breast, performing:
• extract a measure of symmetry comprising a ratio of an area of a smaller hot spot in one breast to an area of a larger hot spot in a contralateral breast;
• and
• communicate the measure of symmetry to a classifier system trained to classify an unclassified hot spot as being possibly malignant and non-malignant otherwise, based on a measure of symmetry.

A method for breast cancer screening using a measure of symmetry extracted from a thermographic image of a left and right breast of a patient, the method comprising:

• receiving at least one thermographic image of a left and right breast of a patient;
• analyzing the thermographic image to determine whether a hot spot exists in each of a left breast and a right breast, a hot spot comprising a patch of pixels with an elevated temperature with respect to a temperature of pixels in surrounding tissue;
• and
• in response to a hot spot being identified in each breast, performing:
• binarizing the hot-spots in each breast, with a value of 1 for pixels in the hot spots and a value of 0 for other pixels;
• convoluting the binary maps of the two breasts;
• using a maximum value in the convolution as a measure of overlap area between the hot spots of the left and right breasts;
• and
• providing the overlap area as a measure of symmetry to a classifier system trained to classify an unclassified hot spot as being possibly malignant and non-malignant otherwise, based on a measure of symmetry.