Using Thermography as Auxiliary Tool to Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis: a Case Study

The diagnostic medicine evolves and takes benefit from the development of technology constantly. New therapeutic modalities are studied in the area of oncology in order to assist, evaluate, and monitor the diagnosis of cancer. The thyroid cancer is a disease that has increased in incidence and mainly affects women. Infrared thermography is an imaging technique that helps to diagnose several kinds of cancer as shown in several researches. It is useful for monitoring therapeutic procedures and detecting the appearance of new nodes. Its effectiveness depends on the use of correct protocol of acquisition and analysis of the images and precise assessment of thermograms. This work focuses on checking the viability of thermal imaging in the evaluation of thyroid cancer recurrence. A female patient presented right lobectomy of the thyroid gland and diagnosed with adenoma in the upper third of the left lobe of the thyroid participated in the study. The dynamic thermography under cold stressing was used. The analysis of variation rate and the average difference of temperature in the cancerous tissue (left lobe) comparing to the healthy tissue (isthmus) were performed. Forty photos were evaluated during fifteen minutes. The images were taken every ten seconds in the first five minutes. The temperature variation rate increased in both regions during this time according to the results. The average of temperature difference, compared to the healthy tissue (isthmus) after cold stressing is 1.0
^o
C after 5 or 10 minutes and 0.8
^o
C after 15 minutes. The temperature ripple was higher on the healthy tissue (5°C) than on the cancerous one (3.6
^o
C) right after cold stressing. Thermography seems to be effective in detecting the new thyroid nodule in the left lobe.