Segmentation of Thermal Breast Images Using Convolutional and Deconvolutional Neural Networks

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death for women in the U.S. Early detection of breast cancer has been shown to be the key to higher survival rates for breast cancer patients. We are investigating infrared thermography as a noninvasive adjunctive to mammography for breast screening. Thermal imaging is safe, radiation-free, pain-free, and non-contact. Segmentation of breast area from the acquired thermal images will help limit the area for tumor search and reduce the time and effort needed for manual hand segmentation. Autoencoder-like convolutional and deconvolutional neural networks (C-DCNN) are promising computational approaches to automatically segment breast areas in thermal images. In this study, we apply the C-DCNN to segment breast areas from our thermal breast images database, which we are collecting in our clinical trials by imaging breast cancer patients with our infrared camera (N2 Imager). For training the C-DCNN, the inputs are 132 gray-value thermal images and the corresponding manually-cropped breast area images (binary masks to designate the breast areas). For testing, we input thermal images to the trained C-DCNN and the output after post-processing are the binary breast-area images. Cross-validation and comparison with the ground-truth images show that the C-DCNN is a promising method to segment breast areas. The results demonstrate the capability of C-DCNN to learn essential features of breast regions and delineate them in thermal images.