A Kinect-Based System for Upper-Body Function Assessment in Breast Cancer Patients

Common breast cancer treatment techniques, such as radiation therapy or the surgical removal of the axillary lymphatic nodes, result in several impairments in women’s upper-body function. These impairments include restricted shoulder mobility and arm swelling. As a consequence, several daily life activities are affected, which contribute to a decreased quality of life (QOL). Therefore, it is of extreme importance to assess the functional restrictions caused by cancer treatment, in order to evaluate the quality of procedures and to avoid further complications. Although the research in this field is still very limited and the methods currently available suffer from a lack of objectivity, this highlights the relevance of the pioneer work presented in this paper, which aims to develop an effective method for the evaluation of the upper-body function, suitable for breast cancer patients. For this purpose, the use of both depth and skeleton data, provided by the Microsoft Kinect, is investigated to extract features of the upper-limbs motion. Supervised classification algorithms are used to construct a predictive model of classification, and very promising results are obtained, with high classification accuracy. J. Imaging 2015, 1 135