Infrared Thermal Mapping, Analysis and Interpretation in Biomedicine

Measurement of body temperature is one of the cornerstones of clinical assessment in medicine. Skin, the largest organ of the human body, is essentially a temperature mosaic determined by the rate of blood flow through arterioles and capillaries adjacent to the skin. This makes the conventional methods of ‘spot’ measurement rather limited in providing detailed information of regional skin temperature. Infrared (IR) thermal imaging however has the potential to provide a robust method of surface temperature mapping in disease states where pathology disturbs the ‘normal’ distribution of blood flow to skin. To advance image inter- pretation from the conventional qualitative narrative to a quantitative and robust system, analytical developments focus on digital images and require computer-aided systems to produce results rapidly and safely. Hierarchical clustering-based segmentation (HCS) provides a generic solution to the complex interpretation of thermal data (pixel by pixel) to produce clusters and boundary regions at levels not discernible by human visual processing. In this chapter, HCS has been used to aid the interpretation of wound images and to identify variations in temperature clusters around and along the surgical wound for their clinical relevance in wound infection.