Thermal imaging in total knee replacement and its relation with inflammation markers

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Orthopedics
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Osteoarthritis necessitates total knee replacement (TKR) for improved quality of life.
• Assessing post-operative recovery and inflammation is crucial for TKR patients.
• Current methods for inflammation assessment can be invasive or lack objective quantification.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate thermal imaging as a non-invasive tool for assessing TKR recovery.
• To investigate the relationship between thermal imaging parameters and clinical inflammatory markers.
• To establish a quantitative and qualitative method for monitoring post-operative knee inflammation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized thermal imaging on 20 patients with bilateral TKR, collecting data pre-operatively and on five post-operative days.
• Employed automatic segmentation to isolate the knee region for temperature analysis.
• Calculated temperature-based parameters (e.g., mean differential temperature, relative percentage of raised temperature) and compared them with serological inflammatory markers.

Main Results:

• Mean skin temperature initially increased post-surgery, returning to pre-operative levels by day 90.
• Mean differential temperature strongly correlated with erythrocyte sedimentation rate (r > 0.893) and C-reactive protein (r > 0.955).
• Visual profiles and relative percentage of raised temperature demonstrated effective qualitative and quantitative assessment of temperature changes.

Conclusions:

• Thermal imaging provides an automatic, non-invasive method for screening elevated skin temperature indicative of inflammation post-TKR.
• The proposed temperature-based technique supports clinicians in the visual assessment of post-operative recovery.
• This approach enhances the monitoring of knee replacement patients by correlating objective thermal data with established inflammatory markers.