Spatiotemporal sharpening of sub-pixel super-resolution by means of two infrared spectrum cameras for early cancer detection
Journal
Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
Journal Volume
6979
Date Issued
2008
Author(s)
Lee, C.-Y.
Hsieh, H.-Y.
Lee, S.-C.
Chen, C.-M.
Abstract
Breast cancer has been one of the leading causes of cancer deaths for females in the developed countries, including the US. While early detection of breast cancer is essential for the reduction of death rate, there may be already more than 107 cells in a breast cancer when it can be observed by X-ray mammogram. As contrast, the passive IR spectrogram proposed by Szu et al. was shown to be promising in detecting the breast cancer several months ahead of mammogram. With the energy readings from two IR cameras, one middle wavelength IR (MIR, 3 - 5μm) and one long wavelength IR (LIR, 8 - 12μm), the IR spectrogram may be computed by using the blind source separation (BSS) algorithms developed by Szu et al. [4-6], which reveals the probability of being a cancer point on the breast surface. Two important tasks are involved in computing the IR spectrogram. One is an accurate estimate of the ground state energy in the Helmholtz free energy, H = E - T0S . The other is a correct pair-up of the points on the MIR and LIR images for a better estimation of IR spectrogram. To minimize the probability of making an erroneous estimate of the ground state energy inherent in the deterministic neighborhood-based BSS algorithm, a spatiotemporal approach is proposed in this paper. It takes into account not only the neighborhood information but also the temporal information in determining the probability of being a cancer point. Furthermore, a new sub-pixel super-resolution registration algorithm incorporating a third energy dimension is proposed to establish better correspondences between the points in the MIR and LIR images. Phantom study has confirmed that sub-pixel registration can be achieved by the proposed registration method. Human subject study further shows that the breast cancer may be detected by the proposed spatiotemporal approach via cross-referencing the IR spectrograms computed from the multiple pairs of MIR and LIR images taken at different times.
SDGs
Other Subjects
Breast cancer; IR spectrogram; LIR images; Super-resolution registration; Blind source separation; Image registration; Mammography; Optical resolving power; Pixels; Oncology
Type
conference paper