Semi - Automatic Segmentation of Human Breast from Thermal Images for Analysis of Human Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is a dreadful disease in woman and it is very common between the age group of 25 - 40, above 40 it becomes more malignant and also difficult to diagnose as it spreads at a faster rate and it cannot be treated. Infrared Thermography (IR) is preferred as one such technique for diagnosis, as it has the ability to detect the temperature variations which differentiates between hot spots and cold spots. The hot spots are likely to be the cancer area. This paper proposes a technique for segmentation of breasts into left and right respectively. An infrared image is taken and the breast segmentation is carried out semi - automatically. Segmentation is a crucial step for analysis purposes. The original contribution of this work is to separate the breast by segmentation and thresholding techniques for further analysis.