A New Database for Breast Research with Infrared Image

Breast cancer has been responsible for several deaths among women around the world. Its causes are unknown, but early diagnosis increases the cure chances of the patient. Breast infrared image has been studied and identified as a potential screening tool for the early cancer detection. However, two topics have retarded the progress of the researches: The absence of a unique acquisition protocol and a public bank of these images. We have revised infrared image acquisition protocols and, based on them, we have reproduced four protocols which have been tested on volunteers of our laboratory. After tests and observations of these protocols, we have suggested a new dynamic protocol to be used as a standard. Furthermore, this paper describes a new infrared image database containing additional breast exams and clinical data of patients of our university hospital. This can be accessed online for free and, presents several search options, including the image content similarity. We believe that such database will be particularly useful to evaluate the potential contribution of the infrared images to breast disease detection.