Kim Nielsen, Utah Valley University
Physical Sciences
Infrared Thermography (IRT) has become popular in the medical field for various applications and procedures. One such application involves the use of IRT in the active detection of skin lesions and neoplasms. More specifically, medical professionals are using IRT as a non-invasive method for the early detection of harmful lesions, such as melanoma.
In this study, the main objective is to explore the opportunity for modifying and utilizing commercially available, and inexpensive, digital camera systems to be applied in medical imaging applications. These modifications allow the camera to detect the varied near infrared (NIR) emission spectrum reflected by both healthy and unhealthy human tissue. Typical IRT studies utilize the thermal black body radiation originating from the human body with wavelength ranges well in the long-wave range (8-15 μm). As the human body does not produce thermal radiation in the NIR spectrum, our study requires an active source of NIR radiation. A group of NIR light emitting diodes is configured to illuminate the region of interest. The NIR light interacts with the human body through absorption and scattering. Depending on the molecular scale sizes, the light is absorbed and scattered differently, producing a stark contrast between, for example, blood and skin/fat. This difference in reflected light is detected by the imaging system.
In addition to outlining an inexpensive method to detect and image veins and skin legions, this paper also discusses the application of NIR for the imagery of deep tissue legions, through the use of active illumination from NIR lasers.