Chapter 2 - Thermal Imaging in Medicine

Abstract

Abstract Thermal imaging technology has made significant advances in recent years. Its use in military applications is already widespread, but not so in medicine. This chapter reviews the physics behind thermal imaging and its applications to medicine to date. Two major approaches used to extract information from thermal images are identified: physics-based approaches, where models of heat transport are adopted and used to infer physiological parameters, and image processing–based approaches, where features are extracted from the image and used as cues to the identification of various conditions of the human body. The first method requires knowledge of the values of some physiological parameters in order to work out the values of others, as well as the use of carefully designed models. The second approach is phenomenological, ignoring the underlying physics that contribute to the appearance of the image and working only with the collected data. This makes such approaches easier to use but the derived measurements are related only indirectly to the actual physiological measurements of the imaged tissue.