An Approach for Thyroid Nodule Analysis Using Thermographic Images

Thyroid cancer is said to be the second most common type of cancer in female individuals and the third in males by 2030, according to projections. In general, detecting cancer in its early stages improves the chance of survival of the individual. Thermography is a diagnostic tool that has been increasingly used to detect cancer and abnormalities, including that of thyroid. Various methods to segment and detect hot regions in thermograms and, consequently, to detect suspicious tissues present in these images have been proposed. It is well known that medical diagnosis yields a great deal of information. Thus, physicians have to comprehensively analyse and evaluate this information in a short period of time, which is infeasible in most cases. In this work, we perform a general review of thermography , focusing on the thyroid analysis. We propose protocols for image acquisiton and an autonomous registration for thyroid images. We also perform analyses of the image data, which include feature extraction, image processing, and a possible approach for classification of healthy or unhealthy patients. In summary, this work presents a pilot project for detection of tumors in our university hospital, which is part of an effort to support preventive medical actions in our endocrinology department. Under some future adjustments, this project will be submitted for approval by the ethics and research committee of Hospital Universitário Antonio Pedro at Universidade Federal Fluminense (HUAP-UFF) and to the Brazilian Ministry of Health Ethical committee under the name: Evaluation of the importance of thermography to aid diagnosis of thyroid nodules of patients in HUAP-UFF (in Portuguese: Avaliação da importância da termografia no auxílio à investigação diagnóstica de nódulos tireoidianos em pacientes acompanhados no HUAP-UFF).