Quantitative archival and retrieval of infrared thermograms for clinical use

Infrared thermography is a radiometric technique which creates a temperature profile of the captured view. It is known for its non-contact and non-ionizing nature and often used in almost every field. With this fact, it attracts the clinicians to use it for screening the various abnormal conditions related to superficial organs of the human body; where it is effectively opted to use alone or in conjunction with other medical imaging modalities. The sharing of patient data is frequent in medical environment, so in case of thermography. This paper gives a brief idea about ongoing clinical applications of infrared thermography and need of standardized thermogram format. This paper focuses on the quantitative approach for storage and retrieval of thermal data in DICOM format. In contrast to false colored thermograms, the proposed file format occupies less storage space and bandwidth. It is concluded that the proposed methodology provides a file format which is easy to handle at both sending and receiving end. These beneficial outcomes encourage its use in clinical environments for sharing and handling of thermographic information.