A combining method for tumors detection from near-infrared breast imaging

This paper introduces the new qualitative and quantitative methods, which can diagnose breast tumors. Qualitative methods include blood vessel display inside and outside of pathological changes part of breast, display of equivalent pixel curves at the part of pathological changes and display of breast tumor image edge. Accordingly, three feature extraction operators are proposed, i.e. the combination operators of anisotropic gradient and smoothing operator, an improved Sobel operator and an edge sharpening operator. Furthermore, quantitative diagnose approaches are discussed based on blood and oxygen contents according to abundant clinical data and pathological mechanism of breast tumors. The results of clinic show that the methods of combining qualitative and quantitative diagnose are effective for breast tumor images, especially for early and potential breast cancer.