Design of A Simple and Low Cost Near InfraRed Imaging (NIRI) System for Breast Cancer Detection

Breast cancer is the second cause of mortality after lung cancer, and it seriously threats women's health. In developing countries, Mammogram is the currently available tool for breast cancer diagnosis. However, it is a relatively expensive device since it needs special room requirements for safety due to the usage of ionizing radiation, which is not safe, especially for pregnant women. Therefore, there is a need to develop a low-cost imaging device that can screen breast cancer in developing countries. Since there are differences in optical densities between normal and abnormal breast tissues at infrared wavelength range, a Near Infra-Red Imaging (NIRI) system is designed and phantoms experiments are implemented to show the ability of the system for detecting breast cancer. The results showed that our proposed system achieve the goals of an efficient, simple, cheap and safe NIRI system which can be used to fill the gap in the developing countries for breast cancer detection scanning, especially in distant and rural areas.