Abstract PO1-07-12: Inverse modeling with surface temperature accurately detects the presence of breast cancer
Authors: Sritharan Nithya , Gutierrez Carlos , Perez-Raya Isaac , Gonzalez-Hernandez Jose-Luis , Owens Alyssa , Dabydeen Donnette , Medeiros Lori , Kandlikar Satish , Phatak Pradyumna 
Published: May 2024

Breast cancer affects over 250,000 women in the United States every year. Patient outcomes including overall survival significantly decline with large sized tumors and nodal involvement on initial presentation. The introduction of mammogram screening has been instrumental in the early detection of cancer. However, it has lower sensitivity in dense breast tissue and limited specificity which leads to unnecessary additional invasive testing. Several methods such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) and ultrasound imaging are used as adjunctive methods. However, there is still a need for cost-effective techniques without additional radiation exposure for breast cancer screening for use with mammography. We propose an adjunctive screening method using surface temperature measurements and inverse breast modeling for early detection of breath cancer. Methods: We enrolled patients who presented with mammogram detected breast tumors that were confirmed to be cancerous lesions by biopsy. We used prone position steady state infrared imaging of bilateral breasts to measure surface temperatures and multi-view MRI images to create patient specific 3D breast models. The inverse technique applies Levenberg-Marquard algorithms (LMA) and utilizes commercial software for thermal transport modeling. The inverse technique predicts a heat generation map normalized for baseline surface temperatures to localize the presence of an underlying tumor. Results: A total of 25 breast tumors (diameter range from 5 to 27 mm) from 24 patients were included in the analysis with a median patient age of 67 years. One patient had bilateral breast tumors. Mammogram data showed inclusion of mixed breast tissue composition including dense and extremely dense breast tissue. LMA accurately detected the tumor in all 25 patients with maximum absolute errors of 7 mm in location of the tumor in the breast and 1.78 mm in diameter. The accuracy of detection was not affected by tumor histology which included invasive ductal and lobular carcinomas, ductal and lobular carcinoma in-situ and atypical ductal hyperplasia. No heat sensitive tumors were detected in the 23 contralateral breasts which acted as internal negative controls. Conclusion: Infrared temperature profiles and inverse modeling successfully detected malignant breast tumors with no missed tumors or false positive results and could be used as adjunctive screening along with mammography, especially in patients with dense breast tissue.

Citation Format: Nithya Sritharan, Carlos Gutierrez, Isaac Perez-Raya, Jose-Luis Gonzalez-Hernandez, Alyssa Owens, Donnette Dabydeen, Lori Medeiros, Satish Kandlikar, Pradyumna Phatak. Inverse modeling with surface temperature accurately detects the presence of breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2023 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(9 Suppl):Abstract nr PO1-07-12.