Breast cancer has been reported to be the first deadly disease that affects women worldwide. This type of cancer has been reported to be the second leading cause of death in women worldwide. Medical reports have also reported that every woman is exposed to having breast cancer with an average probability of about 12%. It has also been reported to be the most common cancer that affects women. Fatality could be due to the cancer detection delay; in other words, early detection of the tumor can increase the survival rate of patients. Routine techniques of imaging modalities for cancer screening such as Mammography, Computated Tomography (CT) scan, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and ultrasound are impractical tools for many reasons such as the irreproducible nature, the high error rate in cases of thick breasts, the pain and the annoyance they cause. Consequently, there is a need for more convincing strategies with high accuracy rates in breast cancer detection. Therefore, among the large variety of medical breast scanning techniques, thermography has attracted attention in applications related to detection and diagnosis. It is capable of providing helpful and useful information about the physiological variations and accordingly, it can detect tumors even in early stages. In addition, it is a very safe scanning tool, so as many needed tests can be held in proper time and manner. Thermography relies on the fact that human body temperature generally is a natural norm for the diagnosis of diseases. Thermography in medical applications applies infrared body examination tool which is fast, noninvasive, noncontact, pain free, radiation free and flexible to monitor the temperature of the human body. The fundamental principle of thermography relies on physiology such as the distribution of temperature on the skin surface. Infrared thermography scanning for breasts is an imaging technique which essentially searches for temperature change in human body. Temperature variance could be considered as a good indicator of tumor occurrence in the scanned area. Tumor mainly causes a noteworthy increase in blood vessel circulation and metabolic activity, so it causes higher radiations emitted from the human body around the regions of tumor. The paper surveys the literature work conducted in the field of breast cancer detection from thermogram scans. The survey is followed by a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of thermography-based tumor detection. A new research idea and some considerations are then suggested based on that discussion to achieve better results in this critical area.
Breast Cancer Detection in Mammogram Medical Images with Data Mining Techniques
