Investigations on diabetic foot impairment using NIR images and thermoregulatory behavior

Diabetes is a chronic disease occurring due to insufficient production of insulin by the pancreas or the body's ineffective usage of the insulin produced. The former leads to Type 1 diabetes whereas the latter leads to Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is estimated to have affected 422 million people globally and 69.2 million people in India, every year. Diabetes if left untreated can cause serious health complications such as peripheral nerve dysfunction, diabetic retinopathy, diabetic foot and also doubles the risk of early death, thus making early diagnosis very essential for better disease management, thus improving the quality of life of the patient. If diabetic foot is not detected at an early stage, it may lead to foot amputation of the patient. This paper presents a neoteric technique for diagnosis of diabetic foot by using NIR images and the thermoregulatory behavior of a patient's feet. A total of 10 sets of images (60 images) of 10 subjects were obtained and analyzed statistically using pixel intensity matrix parameters. The results obtained show that there is a distinct variation in the image parameters between the healthy and diabetic person's foot images; this may lead to the feasibility of developing an expert system for automatic screening of diabetic foot.