Potential of Thermography in Pain Diagnosing and Treatment Monitoring
Pain has been a problem to be differentially diagnosed for years since it has been diagnosed subjectively. Thermography can provide data of pain quantitatively as it reports detail and deep thermal variations. Hence, this method can be useful to diagnose
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Abstract Pain has been a problem to be differentially diagnosed for years since it has been diagnosed subjectively. Thermography can provide data of pain quantitatively as it reports detail and deep thermal variations. Hence, this method can be useful to diagnose pain objectively. It is a noninvasive complementary diagnostic approach that allows the practitioners to see and quantify alterations on skin temperature. Since in a healthy human individual, there is a high degree thermal symmetry in terms of both magnitude and pattern in the same regions in contralateral parts of the body, subtle skin temperature changes can be easily detected. According to thermography pain is classified based on which part of the body is involved. It is mostly classified in diseases as neural, inflammatory, musculoskeletal, and vascular. Nowadays with the new generation of infrared cameras and very advanced sensitive sensors, thermography has been applied in many medical applications. Pain diagnosis is one of the many uses of thermography in medicine. This chapter introduces pain and application of thermography for diagnosis of different pain categories as well as monitoring the treatments. Keywords Thermography
Pain diagnosing Treatment monitoring
1 Introduction In very old practice of medicine, practitioners measure temperature by hands. Hippocrates, approximately four decades B.C., applied wet sludge to patient’s body to identify superficial body temperature. The areas that had disease dried more quickly. It is obvious that a number of pathological factors are involved in M. Etehadtavakol Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran E.Y.K. Ng (&) School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798 Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 E.Y.K. Ng and M. Etehadtavakol (eds.), Application of Infrared to Biomedical Sciences, Series in BioEngineering, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3147-2_2
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thermoregulation of human body. Hence, extracting thermal patterns of human body can help to access valuable information regarding the underlying physiological process causing diseases. Dissipation of heat through the skin generates infrared radiation that can be captured by sensitive infrared detectors. Pain is a complicated experience and the most familiar explanation for patient–clinician discussion in most developed countries. It is a major symptom in many medical conditions. We briefly introduce different pain categories in Sect. 2. Physiology of human skin is discussed in Sect. 3. Section 4 is about interpretation guidelines. Application of thermal imaging to diagnose different pain categories and treatment monitoring are presented in Sect. 5. Conclusion is provided in Sect. 6.
2 Classifications of Pain There are many ways to classify pain and classifications may overlap. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), in 1994, categorized pain in accordance with
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