Thermal analysis of infra-red mammography

Reports on the thermal analysis of normal and abnormal infra-red breast thermograms. The analysis is based on a series of digital infra-red mammograms of the breasts subjected to a very low level of microwave radiation. Such radiation produces a higher heating rate for tumorous tissue that normal healthy tissue. The technique uses a sequence of thermograms taken during the cooling process to classify abnormal conditions that manifest themselves as body temperature abnormalities. The sequence of images are presented in a `dual-space' representation. The variations in thermal response are enhanced by eliminating the effect of the mean temperatures by projection along the direction of the mean temperature. This reduces the dimensionality of the data by one and arranges the axes in convenient directions. However, not all of the new dimensions contribute equally to the discriminatory or diagnostic information contained in the images. A compression of the discriminatory information spread over all these dimensions is achieved by applying a Karhunen-Loeve transformation