**1. Introduction**

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women today. According to WHO, 1 in every 12 women have the risk of a breast abnormality in her lifetime. It is well established that early diagnosis is very critical to increase survival rates. For example, a study sponsored by Australian Government found that the breast cancer survival is strongly associated with tumor size at detection. In Australia in 1997, five‐year relative survival was 98, 95, 93, 88 and 73% for women with tumors of size 0–10, 11–15, 16–19, 20–29 and 30 mm or greater, respec‐ tively [1]. Unfortunately, 70% of the breast cancer cases are detected when the tumor size is over 30 mm [2]. Therefore, there is a critical need for a method that can detect early‐stage breast cancer.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Thermography is a method of cancer screening that has been known to detect early‐stage cancer [3]. However, there is a lot of variation in the results of clinical studies based on ther‐ mography and many show low specificity. A medical scientist and deep expert in thermogra‐ phy, Dr. Gautherie, observed that the lack of technical skill and expertise to interpret thermal images leads to this low diagnostic accuracy [3]. Recent developments on high‐resolution thermal cameras and computer algorithms for thermal analysis are making the interpretation process more factual. With increased computation power, automated diagnostics is also able to decrease the false‐positive rates. Hence, thermal imaging along with computer‐aided diag‐ nostics is showing a promise of upgrading breast thermography to main stream usage. In this chapter, we study these recent trends in advanced thermal imaging as well as the advances in imaging algorithms.
