Diagnostic and prognostic role of infrared thermography.

A series of 469 breast cancer studied by physical examination (PE), mammography (M) and infrared thermography (TH) is discussed. Follow-up was performed up to 5 years later. The poor diagnostic role of TH is proven for the low sensitivity in the total series (0.47) and, particularly, in T1 cancers (0.26). TH does not increase significantly the cumulative sensitivity (0.98 vs. 0.97 in the total series). Its limited advantage is offset by the great number of useless biopsies due to TH false positive. A correlation between TH pattern and prognosis is evident only when TH is considered independently from other reliable prognostic indicators such as the T or N categories. If survival curves are stratified by T or N or if a multivariate analysis based on TH, T and N variables is performed, all correlations between TH pattern and prognosis disappear; for this reason the use of TH as a prognostic indicator in the clinical practice is disregarded.