Breast Thermography, Risk Assessment, Treatment Monitoring
In this video, Robert Kane spends about 28 minutes speaking on "Breast Thermography, Risk Assessment, Treatment Monitoring" at the 33rd Annual Cancer Convention held on Labor Day weekend by the Cancer Control Society.
About Robert Kane
ROBERT KANE, DC, DABCT, FIACT received his Degree from Palmer Chiropractic University in San Jose, California. He subsequently began training in Thermal Imaging at National College of Chiropractic in Lombard, Illinois and mentored under William Hobbins, M.D. Dr. Hobbins is an early pioneer and world authority on Thermal Breast Imaging.
Dr. Kane is Board Certified as a Diplomate through the American Board of Clinical Thermographers (DABCT) and is a Fellow through the International Academy of Clinical Thermology (FIACT). He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the International Academy of Clinical Thermography, International Thermographic Society and the American Medical Infrared Academy.
He frequently lectures to physicians and laypersons on the role of Thermal Imaging in breast cancer detection, treatment and prevention. Recent lectures include the tumor boards of Sutter Hospital, Santa Rosa, California; Cedars Sinai, Los Angeles, California; and Boulder Community Hospital, Boulder, Colorado. He also provides community lectures on helping prevent breast cancer with Nutrition.
Dr. Kane practices at Woodside Thermal Imaging in Redwood City, California and provides interpretation services for 20 Thermal Imaging Centers in the United States.
He may be reached by phone 650-568-9292 or by email at [email protected]
Transcription
Thank you very much. It's very exciting to be here listening to the speakers and seeing the direction that Cancer Control Society is going into. It's very motivating and very exciting.
And what I'd like to share with you today is a tool that I think is going to help enable further advances in not only breast cancer treatments, but also breast cancer prevention. And this is a tool called breast thermography. Now, breast thermography has gone through many different changes and the names have actually changed throughout the years. You may also hear it is called thermal breast imaging, infrared imaging, digital infrared imaging. These are all just terminology ways to describe the same entity. But basically, let's talk about what this is and how it fits into the breast cancer paradigm. In 1982, thermal breast imaging or breast mammography, was approved as an adjunct to the mammogram in terms of diagnostics. So it was something to be used in addition to standard diagnostic testing to improve the accuracy rate. It measures the infrared emissions from the breast regardless of the cause. Now, when we're talking about infrared emissions, what we're talking about is how the body gets rid of heat when we're producing heat through the metabolic processes or any other method. We have to discharge that into the environment. And the primary way we do that is to convert it into something called infrared radiation, which is a nontoxic form that we naturally omit into the environment. With thermography, we actually use sophisticated cameras to measure that radiation and then graphically represented. Advantages, that is, that it's noninvasive. So there's no touching the body and there's nothing done to the body. So there's no radiation, there's no magnetism. It simply reads the heat coming off of the body. It's non contact and it's physiological or functional imaging. Now, many of the tests that we use in breast cancer are basically structural tests, mammogram, ultrasound, where we're looking at structural concerns. Do we see a density? Do we see a mass functional imaging or physiological imaging is looking at how the tissue is performed. Is the tissue active? And the assumption there is, of course, that cancer tends to be more active since it's growing rapidly. So we may see the heat coming from that particular tissue change. Some fallacies that have been propagated throughout the years. I like to usually address because I think it's important to define the technology and what it does. It is not early detection in itself, although it can enable early detection if a tumor is growing very rapidly. It will tend to produce heat. So we may actually see signs of