Design of a highly accurate data acquisition device for thermal imaging based early detection of breast cancer

Worldwide cancer statistics shows that breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and is a leading cause of cancer death in developing countries. Late stage malignancy detection and inaccessible diagnosis and treatment accounts to the major cause of high mortality rates in breast cancer. Mortality can be significantly reduced if identified at an earlier stage. Proper screening modalities shall be performed for the early detection to increase the survival probability and to reduce the treatment cost and morbidity rates. This paper presents a novel data acquisition device based on thermography for the early detection and screening of breast cancer especially in young women with dense breast. A simple, portable, high accurate, low cost data acquisition device (DAQ) was indigenously developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), funded by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MeitY). The paper discusses the salient features involved in the design of the data acquisition unit for the screening of breast cancer.