The Autonomic Challenge and Breast Thermology
Back in the 1960s, when the science of thermography was not as well developed as it is today, the evaluation of patients’ studies was based on a system that compared the shapes of thermal pattern with those of patients’ with established disease. Subsequently, important scientific discoveries have provided more accurate means of evaluating breast thermograms. Specific metabolic abnormalities of cancer produce very high concentrations of a powerful vaso-dilator called nitric oxide and grow a specific type of functionally defective blood vessels (neo-angiogenic) to feed the neoplasm (new tissue) of cancer. These two conditions produce “Hot Spots” of breast cancer detected by thermal imaging as a result of uncontrolled flow (hyperemia) of core body-temperature blood channeled to breast cancer, even the very smallest cancers, even pre-cancer. The most powerful means of characterizing the hyperemia of core body-temperature blood of breast cancer is to perform an adaptive functional challenge as part of the thermographic imaging. One of the means by which we regulate our body temperature involves an autonomic nervous system that modulates the flow of blood to the skin. The adaptive function challenge will differentiate the un-modulated hyperemia that is characteristic of breast cancer from the adaptive cooling of normal breast tissue. The best developed means of an adaptive functional challenge for thermography is a one-minute immersion of the hands into cool water between two sets of high-resolution thermal images. This “cold water challenge” has been demonstrated as a powerful component of the quantitative and objective analysis performed by our expert and Board Certified thermologist at Therma-Scan Reference Laboratory along with pattern recognition, measured temperature differentials and time-based evolution. Anything less is to ignore important scientific discoveries and risk an inadequate evaluation.
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