Thermal Simulations of Cancerous Breast Tumors and Cysts on a Realistic Female Torso

Abstract

Medical thermography has been around for several decades however due to its low specificity it has not become a popular medical diagnostic technique. The development of computational models of heat transfer in biological tissue can provide a deeper knowledge of healthy and nonhealthy thermal patterns which could increase the specificity of this technique increasing its usefulness in clinical diagnosis. In this work, the thermal pattern of cancerous tumors and cysts are calculated through finite element computer simulations using a real human female torso. The simulation results show a thermal pattern that agrees with infrared thermal images taken from female subjects, the simulated thermal patterns show real thermal features that do not appear in simulations performed using other approximate geometries of the breast. Results show that the temperature on the region of the skin closest to the tumor decreases for cysts while it increases for malignant tumors. The temperature patterns show a 20% deviation from thermal simulations using a hemispherical model of the breast, these results reinforce the notion that the geometry used for thermal simulation plays an important role in the accuracy of the simulations. These results are a first step in understanding benign and malignant thermal processes of the breast which might help increase the usefulness of infrared imaging in breast clinical diagnosis.