Development of an image processing software for medical thermogram analysis using a commercially available image processing system

The medical far infrared (FIR) imaging system has recently been modified to be more sensitive, rapid and cheap. Also, the image format for processing on a personal computer and output format from integrated circuit of a FIR sensor have gradually been standardized. The objective of the report is to develop an application software to analyze clinical FIR images. We developed new programs which are written as macro programs on commercially available image processing software and by which any digital image data with known data format becomes applicable to the standard FIR image analysis system. NIH Image was introduced as the image processing software. Sequences of calls or routines for medical oriented image processing were written with macro codes in Macintosh computers. We aimed to obtain the same image processing functions which had been developed for medical computer thermography systems. Every source FIR image was converted into temperature images (thermograms). Marking on the same temperature region (isotherm), making temperature profiles (line scan) and temperature histograms of region of interest (ROI), drawing temporal temperature difference images (dT thermogram), comparing the temperature difference of two ROI (asymmetry detection thermogram), and displaying thermography index thermogram (TI thermogram) have been developed.