A Non-invasive Method for Measuring Blood Flow Rate in Superficial Veins from a Single Thermal Image

In this paper, we propose a thermal image based measurement technique for the volumetric flow rate of a liquid inside a thin tube. Our technique makes use of the convection heat transfer dependency between the flow rate and the temperature of the flowing liquid along the tube. The proposed method can be applied to diagnose superficial venous disease non-invasively by measuring the volumetric blood flow rate from a FLIR LWIR single thermal image.