Detection of Breast Diseases using Numerical Study of Light Propagation

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most women killing disease worldwide which is easily treated in its early stages before symptoms appear. Therefore, early detection of breast tumor is very significant to reduce the breast cancer death rate. Since the limitations of breast diagnosis techniques, such as X-ray mammography, magnetic resonance imaging, breast ultrasonography and breast biopsies, in early assessment of the breast tissue, optical breast imaging methods have been appeared. In this article, an optical imaging method based on numerical study of light propagation in breast tissue, to measure spatially resolved steady state diffuse reflectance, transmittance and absorbed fraction features, by means of Monte-Carlo simulation was applied for early detection of the breast cancer. The features were measured for 5 mm thick samples of healthy breast tissue and breast tissues with benign and malignant tumors. The obtained results revealed that the features can be used for early detection of breast cancer in addition to the discrimination of benign and malignant tumors which can be very helpful in medical diagnosis of many breast diseases.