Non-invasive estimation of the metabolic heat production of breast tumors using digital infrared imaging

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that digital infrared imaging can non-invasively estimate the metabolic heat produced by breast tumors, which may help assess tumor malignancy and growth potential.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical simulation approach to estimate tumor metabolic heat from infrared images, linking thermal data to tumor malignancy.

Findings

Infrared imaging can estimate tumor metabolic heat non-invasively.

Metabolic heat correlates with tumor malignancy and growth rate.

Simulation results support clinical potential of thermal imaging for cancer assessment.

Abstract

In this work the metabolic heat generated by breast tumors was estimated indirectly and noninvasively from digital infrared images and numerically simulating a simplified breast model and a cancerous tumor, this parameter can be of clinical importance since it has been related to the doubling volume's time and malignancy for that particular tumor. The results indicate that digital infrared imaging has the potential to estimate in a non-invasive way the malignancy of a tumor by calculating its metabolic heat generation from bioheat thermal transfer models.