Detecting Vasodilation as Potential Diagnostic Biomarker in Breast Cancer Using Deep Learning-Driven Thermomics

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Early diagnosis improves outcome and survival, which is the cornerstone of breast cancer treatment. Thermography has been utilized as a complementary diagnostic technique in breast cancer detection. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the capacity to capture and analyze the entire concealed information in thermography. In this study, we propose a method to potentially detect the immunohistochemical response to breast cancer by finding thermal heterogeneous patterns in the targeted area. In this study for breast cancer screening 208 subjects participated and normal and abnormal (diagnosed by mammography or clinical diagnosis) conditions were analyzed. High-dimensional deep thermomic features were extracted from the ResNet-50 pre-trained model from low-rank thermal matrix approximation using sparse principal component analysis. Then, a sparse deep autoencoder designed and trained for such data decreases the dimensionality to 16 latent space thermomic features. A random forest model was used to classify the participants. The proposed method preserves thermal heterogeneity, which leads to successful classification between normal and abnormal subjects with an accuracy of 78.16% (73.3–81.07%). By non-invasively capturing a thermal map of the entire tumor, the proposed method can assist in screening and diagnosing this malignancy. These thermal signatures may preoperatively stratify the patients for personalized treatment planning and potentially monitor the patients during treatment.