Singular value based characterization and analysis of thermal patches for early breast abnormality detection

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel breast abnormality detection system by utilizing the potential of infrared breast thermography (IBT) in early breast abnormality detection. Since the temperature distributions are different in normal and abnormal thermograms and hot thermal patches are visible in abnormal thermograms, the abnormal thermograms possess more complex information than the normal thermograms. Here, the proposed method exploits the presence of hot thermal patches and vascular changes by using the power law transformation for pre-processing and singular value decomposition to characterize the thermal patches. The extracted singular values are found to be statistically significant (p?