Quantitative retrieval of temperature of breast cancers by microwave radiometric imaging (MWI)

The authors have developed a fast MicroWave radiometric Imaging system (MWI) which realizes thermal images with a good spatial resolution. The authors are undertaking at the present time a large scale clinical evaluation of this system for early stage breast tumor characterization. A Receiver Operating Curve (ROC) statistical analsis of an intermediate stage of 60 patients gives a sensibility and a specificity of up to 80%. The authors show here that this technique can sucessfully be used for noninvasive radiological examination in terms of benign-malignant characterization. Moreover, the use of an inverse problem technique in the spatial frequency domain gives a quantitative measurement of cancer temperature. It is now possible to consider a new application such as the following of temperature during a chemotherapy treatment