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Abstract Breast cancer is a prevalent form of cancer among women. It is associated with increased heat generation due to higher metabolism in the tumor and increased blood vessels resulting from angiogenesis. The thermal alterations result in a change in the breast surface temperature profile. Infrared imaging is an FDA-approved adjunctive to mammography, which employs the surface temperature alterations in detecting cancer. To apply infrared imaging in clinical settings, it is necessary to develop effective techniques to model the relation between the tumor characteristics and the breast surface temperatures. The present work describes the thermal modeling of breast cancer with physics-informed neural networks. Losses are assigned to random points in the domain based on the boundary conditions and governing equations that should be satisfied. The Adam optimizer in TensorFlow minimizes the losses to find the temperature field or thermal conductivity that satisfies the boundary conditions and the bioheat equation. Backpropagation computes the derivatives in the bioheat equation. Analyses of the three patient-specific cases show that the machine-learning model accurately reproduces the thermal behavior given by ansys-fluent simulation. Also, good agreement between the model prediction and the infrared images is observed. Moreover, the neural network accurately recovers the thermal conductivity within 6.5% relative error.
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Generation and Thermal Simulation of a Digital Model of the Female Breast in Prone Position
Infrared breast thermography has been associated with the early detection of breast cancer. However, findings in previous studies have been inconclusive. The upright position of subjects during imaging introduces errors in interpretation because it blocks the optical access in the inframammary fold region and alters the temperature due to contact between breast and chest wall. These errors can be avoided by imaging breasts in prone position. Although the numerical simulations provide insight into thermal characteristics of the female breast with a tumor, most simulations in the past have used cubical and hemispherical breast models. We hypothesize that a breast model with the actual breast shape will provide true thermal characteristics that are useful in tumor detection. A digital breast model in prone position is developed to generate the surface temperature profiles for breasts with tumors. The digital breast model is generated from sequential MRI images and simulations are performed using Finite Volume Method employing Pennes bioheat equation. We investigated the effect of varying the tumor metabolic activity on the surface temperature profile. We compared the surface temperature profile for various tumor metabolic activities with a case without tumor. The resulting surface temperature rise near the location of the tumor was between 0.665 and 1.023 °C, detectable using modern Infrared cameras. This is the first time that numerical simulations are conducted in a model with the actual breast shape in prone position to study the surface temperature changes induced by breast cancer.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1640309
- PAR ID:
- 10075518
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Engineering and Science in Medical Diagnostics and Therapy
- ISSN:
- 2572-7958
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4041421
