Arneodo

Wavelet-based multifractal analysis of dynamic infrared thermograms and X-ray mammograms to assist in early breast cancer diagnosis

Par Alain Arneodo, LOMA, CNRS UMR 5798, Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France

Mardi 1er Mars, 14h, Salle des séminaires, 3ème étage, Batiment A4

Abstract :

Breast  cancer is the most common type of cancer among women and despite recent advances in the medical field, there are still some inherent limitations in the currently used screening techniques.  The  radiological  interpretation  of  X-ray  mammograms  often  leads  to  overdiagnosis and, as a consequence, to unnecessary traumatic and painful biopsies. First we use the  1D  Wavelet  Transform  Modulus  Maxima  (WTMM)  method  to  reveal  changes  in  skin temperature dynamics of women breasts with and without malignant tumor. We show that the statistics of temperature temporal fluctuations about the cardiogenic and vasomotor perfusion oscillations  do  not change across  time-scales for  cancerous  breasts  as  the  signature  of homogeneous  monofractal  fluctuations.  This  contrasts  with  the  continuous  change  of temperature  fluctuation  statistics  observed  for  healthy  breasts  as  the  hallmark  of  complex multifractal  scaling.  When  using  the  2D  WTMM  method  to  analyze  the  roughness fluctuations  of  X-ray  mammograms,  we  reveal  some  drastic  loss  of  roughness  spatial correlations that likely results from some deep architectural change in the microenvironment of a breast tumor. This local breast disorganisation may deeply affect heat transfer and related thermomechanics in the breast tissue and in turn explain the loss of multifractal complexity of temperature  temporal  fluctuations  previously  observed  in  mammary  glands  with  malignant tumor.  These  promising  findings  could  lead to the  future use of combined wavelet-based multifractal  processing  of  dynamic  IR  thermograms  and  X-ray  mammograms  to  help identifying  women  with  high  risk  of  breast  cancer  prior  to  more  traumatic  examinations. Besides potential clinical impact, these results shed a new light on physiological changes that may precede anatomical alterations in breast cancer development.

References :
E. Gerasimova, B. Audit, S.-G. Roux, A. Khalil, F. Argoul, O. Naimark and A. Arneodo,
Multifractal analysis of dynamic infrared imaging of breast cancer, Europhysics Letters 104,
68001 (2013)

E. Gerasimova, B. Audit, S.-G. Roux, A. Khalil, O. Gileva, F. Argoul, O. Naimark and A.
Arneodo, Wavelet-based multifractal analysis of dynamic infrared thermograms to assist in
early breast cancer diagnosis, Frontiers in Physiology 5, 176 (2014)