Harnessing infrared thermography and multi-convolutional neural networks for early breast cancer detection

Breast cancer is a relatively common carcinoma among women worldwide and remains a considerable public health concern. Consequently, the prompt identification of cancer is crucial, as research indicates that 96% of cancers are treatable if diagnosed prior to metastasis. Despite being considered the gold standard for breast cancer evaluation, conventional mammography possesses inherent drawbacks, including accessibility issues, especially in rural regions, and discomfort associated with the procedure. Therefore, there has been a surge in interest in non-invasive, radiation-free alternative diagnostic techniques, such as thermal imaging (thermography). Thermography employs infrared thermal sensors to capture and assess temperature maps of human breasts for the identification of potential tumours based on areas of thermal irregularity. This study proposes an advanced computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system called Thermo-CAD to assess early breast cancer detection using thermal imaging, aimed at assisting radiologists. The CAD system employs a variety of deep learning techniques, specifically incorporating multiple convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to enhance diagnostic accuracy and reliability. To effectively integrate multiple deep features and diminish the dimensionality of features derived from each CNN, feature transformation and selection methods, including non-negative matrix factorization and Relief-F, are used leading to a reduction in classification complexity. The Thermo-CAD system is assessed utilising two datasets: the DMR-IR (Database for Mastology Research Infrared Images), for distinguishing between normal and abnormal breast tissues, and a novel thermography dataset to distinguish abnormal instances as benign or malignant. Thermo-CAD has proven to be an outstanding CAD system for thermographic breast cancer detection, attaining 100% accuracy on the DMR-IR dataset (normal versus abnormal breast cancer) using CSVM and MGSVM classifiers, and lower accuracy using LSVM and QSVM classifiers. However, it showed a lower ability to distinguish benign from malignant cases (second dataset), achieving an accuracy of 79.3% using CSVM. Yet, it remains a promising tool for early-stage cancer detection, especially in resource-constrained environments.