Tissue Mimicking Phantom Design and Characterization for Thermal Imaging Applications on Medical Diagnosis

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the mortal cancerous for women and an early diagnosis, applying an appropriate treatment and prognosis increases the survival chance of the patients. There are different screening methods and thermal imaging is one of the noninvasive promising diagnosis techniques to detect thermal profile anomalies in breasts. This work includes both simulation and experimental studies for the detection of breast tumors by using thermal images. The first step is the simulation studies based on heat transfer in biological tissues. By using the Bio-Heat transfer theory, temperature differences between the healthy and tumorous tissues are acquired. The second step consists of phantom designs and detection of breast tumor via thermographic imaging in in-vitro. Designing an appropriate phantom is tremendously crucial for the calibration of the thermal imaging system and diagnosis of breast cancer. As a result of the study, it is presented that the detection of temperatures difference especially with asymmetry factor between the tumor and healthy tissue region is feasible. Also, it is shown that the simulation based results are consistent with the experimental as well.

Keywords

• breast tumor
• cancer
• phantom
• temperature distribution
• thermal imaging
• thermography

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