Thermal Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection: A Controversy

Breast cancer is proving to be second leading cause of death in females worldwide. It occurs when cells in the breast losses normal growth control and results in metastasis or malignant tumor that spreads throughout the body. Breast cancer accounts for 10% of all women cancers and approximately 22 % of invasive cancer contributing to 18.2% of all cancer deaths worldwide. Several well established imaging modalities used to screen breast cancer includes CBE, mammography, ultrasound, MRI & CT scan. Mammography has been treated as the gold standards for detection of breast cancer but still suffers from limited sensitivity, specificity and several other limitations as a screening tool. Ultrasound and CBE are used as adjunctive tools in screening women with dense breast in coordination with mammography. The limitations of MRI are that it is not good at detection of ductal carcinoma in situ, is slow, expensive and fails to show all calcifications. However all these modalities suffer from one or more common disadvantages of radiation exposure, breast compression, only structural imaging, breast density, age and BRCA1/2 mutations. Hence imaging future is demanding a screening technique which can detect malignancy before any anatomical changes takes place within the body noninvasively and can be applied frequently. It has been reported that cancerous breast areas exhibit abnormal thermal behavior. Thermal imaging involves detection of physiological changes like hyperthermia and hypervascularity due to neoangeogenesis to supply abundant requirements of nutrients to the tumor. The objective of this paper is to represent controversies related to thermal imaging & to represent this imaging modality as the future gold standard for early detection of the breast cancer if carried out in controlled environment by considering in detail, clinical history with modern imaging facilities.