Temperature Nonuniformity During Applying Dynamic Infrared Thermography for Tumor Detection: Impact of Large Vessels

Abstract

During applying infrared thermography for detection of superficial tumors, the presence of large blood vessels transmitting through the detected region and carrying blood at the systemic temperature can be an important source of temperature non-uniformity and possible misdiagnose. However, such important issue in non-invasive thermal diagnostics has received few attentions up to now. In this study, two typical vascular models are applied to probe into the impact of large blood vessels on the skin temperature profiles during applying both steady-state and dynamic infrared thermography. The results indicate that the large vessels close to the disease region can produce significant effects to the thermal images at skin surface, and that without carefully considering the impact of large vessels, both false negative and false positive diagnoses may be made. This study is expected to help realize a more accurate and quantitative non-invasive diagnoses using infrared thermography in the presence of large vessels.