Three-dimensional numerical evaluation of skin surface thermal contrast by application of hypothermia at different depths and sizes of the breast tumor.

Background And Objective: Thermal procedures can provide improvements in the thermal contrast of thermographic images in an attempt to diagnose early cases of breast cancer. This work aims to analyze the thermal contrast of different stages and depths of breast tumors from hypothermia treatment using an active thermography analysis. The influence of variation in metabolic heat generation and adipose tissue composition on thermal contrasts is also analyzed.

Methods: The proposed methodology was based on the solution of the Pennes equation for a three-dimensional model similar to the real anatomy of the breast by commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics. The thermal procedure consists of three steps: Stationary, hypothermia and thermal recovery. During hypothermia, the boundary condition of the external surface was replaced by a constant temperature of 0, 5, 10, and 15 C, simulating a gel pack, for cooling times of up to 20 min. In the thermal recovery, after the removal of the cooling, the breast was submitted again to the condition of natural convection on the external surface.

Results: Thermal contrasts in superficial tumors, for all hypothermia resulted in improvements in thermographs. For smallest tumor, the use of high resolution and sensitive thermal imaging cameras to acquire this thermal change may be necessary. For tumor of diameter of 10 cm, cooling from 0 C can increase the thermal contrast by up to 136% compared to the passive thermography. Analyzes with deeper tumors showed very small temperature variations. Even so, the thermal contrast gain in cooling at 0 C for the tumor with a diameter of 1 cm reached 37% in relation to passive thermography.

Conclusions: Thus, this work contributes as an important tool in the analysis of the appropriate use of hypothermia for different cases in early stages of breast cancer, considering that long times are needed to obtain the best thermal contrast.