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Updated: May 12, 2026

Infrared Thermography for the Detection of Changes in Brown Adipose Tissue Activity
Published on: September 28, 2022
Observing temperature fluctuations in humans using infrared imaging
Wei-Min Liu1, Joseph Meyer, Christopher G Scully
1Naval Medical Research Center, Silver Spring, MD, USA ; National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Abstract:
In this work we demonstrate that functional infrared imaging is capable of detecting low frequency temperature fluctuations in intact human skin and revealing spatial, temporal, spectral, and time-frequency based differences among three tissue classes: microvasculature, large sub-cutaneous veins, and the remaining surrounding tissue of the forearm. We found that large veins have stronger contractility in the range of 0.005-0.06 Hz compared to the other two tissue classes. Wavelet phase coherence and power spectrum correlation analysis show that microvasculature and skin areas without vessels visible by IR have high phase coherence in the lowest three frequency ranges (0.005-0.0095 Hz, 0.0095-0.02 Hz, and 0.02-0.06 Hz), whereas large veins oscillate independently.
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