Similarity Measures to identify changes in Plantar Temperature Distribution in Diabetic Subjects

Diabetic foot is one of the main complications experienced by diabetic patients. An early diagnosis and an appropriated treatment can prevent serious foot problems. This paper presents a criterion to identify thermal changes in the plantar temperature distribution. This criterion is based on the comparison of plantar temperature distribution with a reference distribution obtained from control subjects. A characteristic distribution in one and two dimensions are proposed. To measure the similarity degree, four similarity measures are used: Kullback-Leibler divergence, Jensen-Shannon divergence, Quadratic distance and Earth Movers distance. A 85.9% of 220 samples of diabetic patients presented a change in the plantar temperature distribution which can be a precursor of some complications.