Functional infrared imaging in medicine: a quantitative diagnostic approach

The role and the potentialities of high-resolution infrared thermography, combined to bio-heat modelling, have been largely described in the last years in a wide variety of biomedical applications. Quantitative assessment over time of the cutaneous temperature and/or of other biomedical parameters related to the temperature (e.g., cutaneous blood flow, thermal inertia, sympathetic skin response) allows for a better and more complete understanding and description of functional processes involved and/or altered in presence of ailment and interfering with the regular cutaneous thermoregulation. Such an approach to thermal medical imaging requires both new methodologies and tools, like diagnostic paradigms, appropriate software for data analysis and, even, a completely new way to look at data processing. In this paper, some of the studies recently made in our laboratory are presented and described, with the general intent of introducing the reader to these innovative methods to obtain quantitative diagnostic tools based on thermal imaging.