Image Enhancement by Microwave Double and Multiple Irradiations for Early Diagnosis of Breast Carcinoma

Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells;if not detected and treated at the early stage cancer would become fatal. Early detection of the disease increases the survival rate. Though there are several diagnostic methods, each method is having its own merits and demerits. In this paper, a method of obtaining an active thermo gram by irradiating the patient’s breast twice, thrice using a microwave source of 2450 MHz and allowing them to cool naturally after every radiation is proposed. Results of the experiments conducted using phantom models show the temperature difference between the cancerous and normal breast tissues is increased by the first irradiation considerably;the second irradiation further elevated the temperature difference between the normal and breast tissues. The third irradiation did not have any impact. Results obtained show that both the double irradiation technique and triple irradiation technique produce a temperature difference of 6.75°C between the normal and cancerous breast tissues for a cancer tumor which produces a temperature difference of 1°C between normal and cancerous tissues by passive radiation. Hence there is a marked intensity variation between the normal and cancerous tissues of the breast in thermogram are produced by double irradiation and triple irradiation which makes the early diagnosis of breast carcinoma possible. Since even the third irradiation did not have any impact on the temperature difference between the normal and cancerous breast tissues multiple irradiations is not superior to double irradiation for early diagnosis of breast carcinoma. A thermogram of normal breast is taken as a base line image to simulate the images that would be produced by the proposed method; MATLAB7.1 is used for simulating 38°C, 41°C, 43.75°C thermal images. Thermal images for 37°C, 38°C, 39°C, and 43.75°C were taken using Thermal images (FLIR system-Model FLIR i5-Sweden).