Contact thermography method and TOT and DOT apparatus as an alternative to conventional devices and techniques used in diagnosing of breast cancer

摘要

Introduction Modern medicine actually offers a person an alternative - to maintain health through a preventive regular examination, or in case of a disease consult a doctor and then, on his recommendation, conduct adequate treatment. However, if this disease turns out to be cancerous, the situation can be quite threatening for the patient, since the manifestation of such a disease occurs with the development of the tumor to stages, when the life-time of the patient is already shortened. For example, the five-year survival rate of patients with stage IV breast cancer does not exceed 10% of the number of cases, and if breast cancer is detected in stage I, 90 to 95% of patients experience a 5-year period after surgery ~(1). The time from the appearance of the preclinical stage to the stage when the tumor disease manifests about three-fourths of the total time of the disease cycle before the lethal stage ~(2). The duration of the cycle itself is determined by the degree of malignancy of the tumor, estimated by the time of doubling cancer cells. Modern medicine recommends mammography examinations for breast cancer once or twice a biennium, arguing that the mammary gland undergoes the involution stage by the age of 40 when radiation mammography becomes relatively effective ~(3). However, breast cancer, as practice shows, can also be manifested with pubertal age ~(4), when the tumor is diagnosed with biopsy and results in a mastectomy according to its results. The largest mammologist in Russia, professor L.D. Lindenbraten, assessing the current situation with breast cancer in 1979, spoke about this: "Timely detection of breast cancer ensures the preservation of life, the use of organ-saving treatment methods and reducing the costs of diagnostics and therapy. National and regional programs for mass screening of the female population and the creation of federal and regional registers of people screened and breast cancer patients are needed” [4, page 7]. These wishes are have actuality even now, despite the emergence of alternative techniques and equipment described below. The disadvantages of the conventional techniques and equipment The disadvantages of the most widely used in the diagnosis of breast cancer are due to various reasons. These methods (X-ray, ultrasound) provoke mutations in different degrees by exposure to tissue cells and this can lead to the appearance of tumor neoplasms ~(5,6). his circumstance prevents the possibility of their use in tumor screening, and, in turn, does not provide an opportunity to assess the degree of malignancy of breast cancer and, therefore, to monitor its development operatively. In the worst case, this leads to a loss of time and the tumor develops further. And, if the doubling of cancer cells occurs in a short time, the transition to stage III or IV will take several months ~(7). Methods of remote thermography using a thermal imager are safe, but not informative, because of the high error in estimating the temperature gradients on the patient's breast skin, which makes it impossible to detect small tumors or located in the depth of the body in the area of their projection onto the skin ~(8). These methods and equipment, including X-ray and magnetic resonance tomography, can work only when there is a tumor whose structure and its content is different from the surrounding tissues. This means their inability to determine the coordinates of the preclinical stage before of the occurrence of breast cancer. All these and other drawbacks of conventional methods are well known from the current manuals on mammology ~(3) and from the practice of their application ~(9). About technique of application of TOT and DOT in early diagnostics of a cancer of a mammary gland Using of these apparatus is based on a new principle in the survey, which consists in using the directionality of the heat flux in the human body orthogonally to the skin surface. At the same time, if pathologies are present in the path of this flow in the form of tumor neoplasms, then in their projection the temperature gradients appear on the patient's skin, the sign and magnitude of which are uniquely related to the three-dimensional coordinates and the temperature inside the tumorous neoplasm ~(10,11). Figure 1, respectively, shows the heads of the device TOT (prototype) and DOT1-1 (the last modified sample), with which you can conduct an examination in an offline mode. Figure 2, respectively, shows a technique for examining the mammary glands in a "lying" posture (universal for any bust size) and in a "sitting" position for the size of the bust from the first to the second. There are elastic masks that fix holes in the skin, where temperature gradients are measured. Figure 1 Appearance of the autonomous heads of TOT and DOT.