Classifying hormone receptor status of malignant tumorous tissue from breast thermographic images

A system for classifying the hormone receptor status of malignant tumorous tissue identified in a thermographic image of a breast, the system comprising:

• a storage device containing a classifier system trained to classify a hot spot as one of:
• hormone receptor positive (HR+), and hormone receptive negative (HR−);
• 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 thermographic image(s) of both breasts of a patient with a malignant tumorous region;
• analyze the image(s) to define a boundary contour of the breast in the image(s);
• segment the breast regions into regions of elevated temperature and otherwise;
• and
• analyze the elevated temperature regions to classify the malignant tumorous tissue as being hormone receptor positive, and hormone receptive negative otherwise.

A method for classifying the hormone receptor status of malignant tumorous tissue identified in a thermographic image of a breast, the method comprising:

• receiving thermographic image(s) of both breasts of a patient with a malignant tumorous region;
• analyzing the image(s) to define a boundary contour of the breast in the image(s);
• subtracting the pixel temperatures of the malignant breast with the mean temperature of the contra-lateral breast;
• computing a Run-Length-Matrix from the above temperature map, after quantizing the temperatures into L bins;
• computing textural non-uniformity features from the Run Length Matrix;
• and
• classifying the malignant tumorous tissue as hormone receptor negative if the non-uniformity feature is higher or hormone receptor positive otherwise, using a classifier.

A method for classifying the hormone receptor status of malignant tumorous tissue identified in a thermographic image of a breast, the method comprising:

• receiving thermographic image(s) of both breasts of a patient with a malignant tumorous region;
• analyzing the image(s) to define a boundary contour of the breast in the image(s);
• segmenting the breast regions into regions of elevated temperature and otherwise;
• finding the ratio between the area of elevated temperature region(s) in the malignant tumorous breast and the area of the elevated temperature region(s) in the contralateral breast, or vice-versa;
• and
• determining whether the malignant tumorous region is hormone receptor positive or negative using a classifier on the ratio.