Neonatal infrared thermography imaging: Analysis of heat flux during different clinical scenarios

Introduction: An accurate skin temperature measurement of Neonatal Infrared Thermography (NIRT) imaging requires an appropriate calibration process for compensation of external effects (e.g. variation of environmental temperature, variable air velocity or humidity). Although modern infrared cameras can perform such calibration, an additional compensation is required for highly accurate thermography. This compensation which corrects any temperature drift should occur during the NIRT imaging process. We introduce a compensation technique which is based on modeling the physical interactions within the measurement scene and derived the detected temperature signal of the object. Materials and methods: In this work such compensation was performed for different NIRT imaging application in neonatology (e.g. convective incubators, kangaroo mother care (KMC), and an open radiant warmer). The spatially distributed temperatures of 12 preterm infants (average gestation age 31 weeks) were measured under these different infant care arrangements (i.e. closed care system like a convective incubator, and open care system like kangaroo mother care, and open radiant warmer). Results: As errors in measurement of temperature were anticipated, a novel compensation method derived from infrared thermography of the neonate's skin was developed. Moreover, the differences in temperature recording for the 12 preterm infants varied from subject to subject. This variation could be arising from individual experimental setting applied to the same region of interest over the neonate's body. The experimental results for the model-based corrections is verified over the selected patient group. Conclusion: The proposed technique relies on applying model-based correction to the measured temperature and reducing extraneous errors during NIRT. This application specific method is based on different heat flux compartments present in neonatal thermography scene. Furthermore, these results are considered to be groundwork for further investigation, especially when using NIRT imaging arrangement with additional compensation settings together with reference temperature measurements. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.