Abstract
.Purpose: The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which spread across the globe in a very short period of time, revealed that the transmission control of disease is a crucial step to prevent an outbreak and effective screening for viral infectious diseases is necessary. Since the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, infrared thermography (IRT) has been considered a gold standard method for screening febrile individuals at the time of pandemics. The objective of this review is to evaluate the efficacy of IRT for screening infectious diseases with specific applications to COVID-19.Approach: A literature review was performed in Google Scholar, PubMed, and ScienceDirect to search for studies evaluating IRT screening from 2002 to present using relevant keywords. Additional literature searches were done to evaluate IRT in comparison to traditional core body temperature measurements and assess the benefits of measuring additional vital signs for infectious disease screening.Results: Studies have reported on the unreliability of IRT due to poor sensitivity and specificity in detecting true core body temperature and its inability to identify asymptomatic carriers. Airport mass screening using IRT was conducted during occurrences of SARS, Dengue, Swine Flu, and Ebola with reported sensitivities as low as zero. Other studies reported that screening other vital signs such as heart and respiratory rates can lead to more robust methods for early infection detection.Conclusions: Studies evaluating IRT showed varied results in its efficacy for screening infectious diseases. This suggests the need to assess additional physiological parameters to increase the sensitivity and specificity of non-invasive biosensors.
Highlights
This paper reviews and summarizes existing information on the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of infrared thermography (IRT) utilized in screening for fever as well as the incidence of respiratory infectious diseases during a pandemic
The virus causing COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is in the coronavirus family that caused the outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).[4]
Several studies have been conducted to investigate the efficacy of IRT as a tool for fever detection, which used the forehead as the thermographic region of interest
Summary
This paper reviews and summarizes existing information on the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of infrared thermography (IRT) utilized in screening for fever as well as the incidence of respiratory infectious diseases during a pandemic. Khaksari et al.: Review of the efficacy of infrared thermography for screening infectious. We present options for the use of IRT toward the detection, diagnosis, and monitoring of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during this ongoing pandemic. Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, or fungi that are spread, directly or indirectly, between individuals.[1] The known pandemics throughout history have been related to bacteria and viruses (Fig. 1).[2,3] Currently, the worldwide outbreak of the novel COVID-19 poses a significant threat to global health. As of June 15, 2020, SARS-CoV-2 has infected 7,963,453 people worldwide, killing a total of 434,388, numbers that will increase as the virus continues to spread.[5,6]
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