Diagnostic Biomarker for Breast Cancer Applying Rayleigh Low-Rank Embedding Thermography

: Thermography has found extensive application as a supplementary diagnostic tool in breast cancer diagnosis, notably complementing the clinical breast exam (CBE). Within dynamic thermography, matrix factorization methods have demonstrated their utility in accentuating thermal heterogeneities by generating thermal basis vectors. A significant challenge in such approaches is to identify the leading thermal basis vector that effectively captures predominant thermal patterns. Embedding methods are used to fuse multiple projected basis vectors onto a single basis for the extraction of the thermal features, known as thermomics . In this study, we introduce Rayleigh embedding to project thermal basis vectors obtained from factorization techniques into a lower-dimensional space, highlighting thermal patterns. This enhances the reliability of the thermal system, thereby assisting in CBE. The best results of the embedding method combining clinical information and demographics yield 82.9% (66.7%, 86.7%) using a random forest. The results demonstrated promising preliminary outcomes, leading to the early detection of breast abnormalities, and can serve as a non-invasive tool to aid CBE.