Clinical study on using thermal texture maps in SARS diagnosis

This paper helps define infrared (IR) imaging as a complementary tool to high-speed computer tomography (CT) in the diagnosis of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). We refer to the images captured from IR imaging as thermal texture maps (TTM). Although IR imaging has been criticized of generating high false alarm rate for the lack of quantitative measurement on the size, depth, and shape information of the tumor, we present a new methodology that reveals the depth information and the activity of tumor from processing the surface temperature. The derivation is obtained without solving the ill-posed inverse heat transfer problem. We evaluate the clinical value of TTM in SARS diagnosis and compare the performance with CT. The study took place at Beijing You An Hospital, Beijing, P. R. China. It was conducted on a group of 111 confirmed SARS patients between March 10, 2003 and June 18, 2003. Both CT and TTM are used on the same patient in diagnosis and monitoring. We conclude that TTM is able to depict the position, morphology, and progress of lesions with the same degree of success as CT. The combination of CT and TTM can improve the quality and accuracy of SARS diagnosis.