Electrically stimulated breast model's thermal imaging simulations

Different tissues energy consuming values show differences from each other. Conductivity and metabolic heat source of the tissue alter whether it is healthy or not. The temperature differences of tissues take the thermal infrared imaging into very important and vital point. It was not possible to be able to detect these amounts of differences with the early instrumentation and technology. However, in recent years by the improvement of sensitivity of detectors and cameras it is now possible to sense these amounts of temperature differences. Infrared imaging has a limited performance for the breast cancer diagnosis which occurs especially due to patient moving. Nevertheless, this performance can be improved by applying low frequency currents in medical safety limits. By the help of current application, temperature differences of tissues which have different electrical and thermal properties can be increased and malignant tissue can be distinguished in the obtained thermal image. In this study, woman breast and cancerous tissue are two dimensionally modeled. By using realistic values for regular and cancerous tissue Pennes bio heat equation is solved with finite element method. Simulations are implemented for different tumor locations. Whenever malignant tissue approaches to the skin surface, higher temperature differences are obtained. Imaging performance is increased with current application and tumors can be sensed at 4.5 cm depth with the modern state-of-the-art thermal infrared imagers (possess approximately 10 °mK sensitivity).