Consequently, through measuring the vascular structure over time, DATG effectively monitors the change in breast tissue due to tumors and lesions.
In the early 1970s, studies of Professor J. Tricoire in France focused on the application of contact thermography for the screening of breast cancer using plates with liquid crystals.
[1][2] The principle, on which the methodology developed by Tricoire was based, was to record and map the heat generated by possibly emergent tumors.
[3] During the time at which contact thermography screening was being practiced, more detailed studies on the change in the breast due to the presence of tumors and lesions were being performed.
Dynamic angiothermography utilizes thermal imaging, but with important differences from the older kind of thermography, which impact detection performance.
First, the probes are much improved over the previous liquid crystal plates; they include better spatial resolution, contrastive performance, and the image is formed more quickly.
[5] The general idea emerging from several clinical studies is that every woman has their own blood pattern image, which is like a fingerprint and, in healthy women, can remain unchanged over time.
Mammography measures the differences of the tissue density inside the breast with substantial spatial resolution but requires at least a low dose of radiation.
However, there are concerns that the higher density of breast tissue in patients younger than 40–45 years of age degrades the diagnostic information obtained in this technique.
[8] It is also difficult to see precancerous lesions with mammography, which have not emerged into localized density changes imaged by the low dose of radiation.
However, due to the general equality in acoustic impedance for many types of structures in the breast, ultrasound imaging detects many abnormalities or potential sites that are false positives, limiting its usefulness.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) scanning, as DATG does, can map the blood flow distribution in the breast, and provides information for patients of all ages.
For the same dose delivered in mammography, breast CT produces 3D volumetric images of tumors and lesions that can show the connection to the vascular network.
[11] Another application of DATG is the monitoring of at-risk patients with increased changes of breast cancer who take hormone replacement therapy (sometimes taken to reduce menopause symptoms) and participate in in-vitro fertilization.