Cold Provocation and Active Thermography in Medical Screening

Abstract

This paper presents application of active thermography as a tool for supporting diagnosis of selected dermatological diseases. The cold stress method is used to stimulate human skin and to measure its temperature change in time. Image and data processing techniques are applied to calculate response parameters and plot their spatial distributions (maps). The proposed technique was applied to estimate differences between healthy and unhealthy tissue for patients with psoriasis. Another application concerns detection of regions characterized by different vascularization under the skin. Obtained preliminary results are promising. It was demonstrated that the developed method, after further testing, can be a useful tool to improve the standard diagnostic procedures.