Estimating Breast Thermophysical Parameters by the Use of Mapping Surface Temperatures Measured by Infrared Images

Breast cancer is a disease with high incidence in Brazil and in the world. In this way, it is necessary the implementation of an effective health program for prevention and early detection of the disease. Infrared image can be used as an additional examination to aid the early detection of breast cancer, in order to reduce the mortality rate. Accurate values of thermophysical properties of the human tissues, specially of the breast, is a hard task, due to the difficulty to measure such properties in vivo. Additionally, the breast tissue composition varies with the woman age. This article aims to estimate breast thermophysical properties: the thermal conductivity and the blood perfusion using the mapping of breast surface temperatures measured by the infrared image of the patient over a three-dimensional volume that represents the breast. The BioHeat Transfer Equation was used to calculate the breast temperature profiles. The Sequencial Quadratic Programming was used to estimate the thermal conductivity and the blood perfusion of the breast tissue and of the tumor. The results indicated that the refered method does not guarantee that the values obtained represent the global minimum of the objective function optimization problem.