Abstract
The historical details are important to understand the development and application of thermography with particular emphasis on its application in medicine, explained on breast cancer detection. Today, recommendations for breast cancer include the use of mammography as the gold standard screening method. In public health, the importance of screening women for possible breast cancer is indisputable, especially in light of the fact that the size of the cancer directly corresponds to the success of the cure. A method that will allow early detection of cancer and/or successful follow-up of postoperative or adjuvant treatment is unquestionable. Thermography as a non-invasive method is harmless and therefore enables repetition without harmful radiation to the patient, unlike mammography. These features should be sufficient to empower its application. However, its breakthrough does not proceed as expected. This chapter particularly emphasizes the importance of conducting studies in a uniform manner to enable the collected data to be comparable appropriately with the methods used so far.
TopBackground
“Thermography should not be relied on for early detection of breast cancer.” (Australian Government). And nobody says it should. At least not in scientific community that tries to facilitate breast cancer screening by using solutions that are non-invasive and easy to perform. However, this before mentioned statement of Australian government shows how things could go wrong easily. From FDA approval and classification of thermography as an adjunctive diagnostic screening procedure for the detection of breast cancer to announcement that this methodology is not reliable went barely 40-some years. Enough to “bury” the methodology?
The review of papers published in last 10 years (over 131 of them appeared at PubMed when the search included “thermography” AND “breast cancer” terms) will enlighten the story behind. After getting so many papers, narrowed search included “free full text” and “review” criteria for further work. These criteria are very important while this chapter will discuss the breakthrough of thermography into (bio)medicine and the establishment of any new methodology depends on its reliability which in science is mainly approved by review studies. This narrowed search gave 3 (three!) papers in total:
“Artificial intelligence methods for the diagnosis of breast cancer by image processing: a review” by Sadoughi et al. Breast Cancer (2018);
“Breast Cancer Detection Using Infrared Thermal Imaging and a Deep Learning Model” by Mambou et al. Sensors (2018); and
“The benefits and harms of screening for cancer with a focus on breast screening“ by Brodersen Jørgensen and Gøtzsche Pol Arch Med Wewn. (2010).
Even though these articles are reviews, it is visible that two of them are from 2018 and one from 2010. Moreover, in search of 10 years, maybe in another database will results be different, but the most important was to show how small proportion of them one can find in the set of 131 papers related to the thermography and breast cancer.
The answer pop-ups by itself – there is no enough review done on the subject. In ten years, only three reviews. In addition, as it will be visible through this chapter – the main obstacle in introducing new methods, methodologies or techniques in medicine is the lack of reviews and analysis that will comprehensively present data, results and their strengths and weaknesses.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Public Health: Science that focuses on disease prevention, prolonging life and promoting human health through public health interventions and actions, which include informing and educating society and individuals, and treatments and methods that uniformly protect them.
Thermal Imaging: Represent the process of converting the IR radiation (heat) into visible images that present spatial distribution of temperature differences.
Precautionary Principle: Relates to promotion and protection of human health where any features, actions or methodology, if potentially harmful or not safety for individual and/or population health, is perceived as threat that must be addressed in favor of prevention.
Thermography in Biomedicine: Any thermal monitoring made on living organisms in order to study, heal, or protect them.
Machine Learning: Study of algorithms and statistical models that computers use to perform tasks for which they do not have instructions. Instead, they rely on patterns and they use acquired data to make predictions or decisions. This is one of the steps of artificial intelligence.
Screening: Strategy that aims to reduce the risk of disease in individual or population by checking them for undesirable factors or features that contribute to individual or population susceptibility to disease development.