Twelve-Month Evaluation of Temperature Effects of Radiotherapy in Patients after Mastectomy.

Agnieszka Baic,Barbara Lange,Armand Cholewka,Agata Stanek,Krzysztof Ślosarek,Łukasz Michalecki,Dominika Plaza

doi:10.3390/ijerph19052834

Abstract

The aim of this study was to verify the changes in the temperature distribution within the breast at twelve months after the end of radiotherapy for breast cancer. The study included twenty-four women. The first test group consisted of twelve women who underwent breast mastectomy and qualified for radiotherapy according to standard medical treatment procedures. The second group included twelve healthy women. The tests were conducted before treatment with radiation therapy and two months, six months, nine months, and one year after the end of treatment. The mean temperature values changed depending on the time that had elapsed since the end of treatment. The highest temperature increase in all patients was observed six months after the end of radiotherapy. This research has confirmed that the assessment of temperature changes in the breast area after radiotherapy can evaluate the severity and lesions in the time course of the radiation reaction.

Highlights

Thermal imaging has been used in medicine, biomedical engineering, and physical therapy for a few decades [1,2]
It allows the assessment of the body surface temperature distribution, which is valuable and useful, because local temperature changes can inform the physician about metabolism changes and indirectly represent the pathological processes in the human body
The human body emits the radiation in the infrared range, which can be imaged by a thermal camera

Summary

Introduction

Thermal imaging has been used in medicine, biomedical engineering, and physical therapy for a few decades [1,2] It allows the assessment of the body surface temperature distribution, which is valuable and useful, because local temperature changes can inform the physician about metabolism changes and indirectly represent the pathological processes in the human body. Infrared thermography is a scientific field that uses the properties of electromagnetic radiation in the infrared range to measure the temperature of the surface of objects. This analysis is based on the fact that everything and everyone has a temperature higher than absolute zero (0 K) [2]. The effect of this phenomenon is to create an image in the form of a thermogram, which is a visual indicator of the amount of infrared energy emitted or reflected by the tissue [3–6]

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