Portable Malignant Lesion Detection with Low Cost Mobile Infrared Thermography

Cancerous skin lesions, specifically melanoma, are strongly thought to be hyperthermic in relation to surrounding skin. Through a process called thermography, cancerous skin lesions can be detected with manual analysis of infrared imaging. In current practice, thermography is very costly and not mobile because thermal imaging cameras are very expensive, bulky, and higher-end models are usually export-restricted due to the military uses for this technology. This paper proposes a system that utilizes mobile technology, cloud computing, and low cost thermal sensors to create a complete system that can accurately, quickly, and automatically predict the presence of cancerous tissue on a patient in home environment. More specifically, in this on-going project we design a small, portable, low-cost infrared sensors embedded micro-controller for anywhere anytime use. We also develop a small apparatus for calibration that is integrated to the system to help image stabilization, to help color and thermal calibration, and fix image registration problems. This micro-controller is wirelessly connected to a mobile phone and also connected to cloud computing environment as a medium for a secure data storage and image processing purposes.