Abstract
BackgroundRegulation of temperature is clinically important in the care of neonates because it has a significant impact on prognosis. Although probes that make contact with the skin are widely used to monitor temperature and provide spot central and peripheral temperature information, they do not provide details of the temperature distribution around the body. Although it is possible to obtain detailed temperature distributions using multiple probes, this is not clinically practical. Thermographic techniques have been reported for measurement of temperature distribution in infants. However, as these methods require manual selection of the regions of interest (ROIs), they are not suitable for introduction into clinical settings in hospitals. Here, we describe a method for segmentation of thermal images that enables continuous quantitative contactless monitoring of the temperature distribution over the whole body of neonates.MethodsThe semantic segmentation method, U-Net, was applied to thermal images of infants. The optimal combination of Weight Normalization, Group Normalization, and Flexible Rectified Linear Unit (FReLU) was evaluated. U-Net Generative Adversarial Network (U-Net GAN) was applied to thermal images, and a Self-Attention (SA) module was finally applied to U-Net GAN (U-Net GAN + SA) to improve precision. The semantic segmentation performance of these methods was evaluated.ResultsThe optimal semantic segmentation performance was obtained with application of FReLU and Group Normalization to U-Net, showing accuracy of 92.9% and Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 64.5%. U-Net GAN improved the performance, yielding accuracy of 93.3% and mIoU of 66.9%, and U-Net GAN + SA showed further improvement with accuracy of 93.5% and mIoU of 70.4%.ConclusionsFReLU and Group Normalization are appropriate semantic segmentation methods for application to neonatal thermal images. U-Net GAN and U-Net GAN + SA significantly improved the mIoU of segmentation.
Highlights
Regulation of temperature is clinically important in the care of neonates because it has a significant impact on prognosis
Neonatal body temperature is known to have a significant effect on prognosis [1,2,3,4,5], and body temperature is inversely correlated with mortality in infants [1, 2, 4]
Contact-type probes are used for continuous temperature measurement, but their use is associated with hygiene risks and they can damage the fragile skin of infants
Summary
Regulation of temperature is clinically important in the care of neonates because it has a significant impact on prognosis. Knobel et al [15] measured body temperature using thermistors attached to the abdomen and feet of very low birth weight (VLBW) infants, and reported its relation to peripheral vasoconstriction. These reports suggest the importance of temperature control and detailed regional temperature measurement in infants. These studies used contact-type probes, which are associated with a number of issues that lead to inaccuracy of measurements, including probe position, fixation method, contact with the skin, and the inability to measure the temperature distribution over the whole body. Abbas et al [18] developed a detailed measurement model to accurately measure body temperature in infants based on thermal images, and Ussat et al [19] proposed a non-contact method for measurement of respiratory rate based on the temperature difference of inhaled air
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