Monitoring Common Skin Lesions using Thermography: A Preliminary Study

Infrared thermography is a non-invasive and non-radioactive diagnostic method based on the perception of the surface temperature of a body. Body temperature is an acceptable indicator of health conditions that can be used to monitor skin lesions. The development of a medical device for skin lesions can help clinical professionals evaluate patient registration, patient monitoring, and medical training. It can even be used as home care by the patient himself or as telemedicine. In this sense, this work arises, which aims to evaluate the accuracy about the detection and segmentation of common skin lesions obtained in a controlled environment, using a common thermographic camera and a thermographic camera for a smartphone. Some tests were carried out, with feet thermographic images of 2 volunteers (left foot and right foot) and an application was developed in MATLAB using image processing techniques that allow to automatically segment the region of interest and extract characteristics such as area, the minimum, maximum, average temperature and standard deviation of this region. The results show that the images acquired by a common thermographic camera are more accurate and reliable, but the control and monitoring are possible to be carried out with the thermographic smartphone camera, allowing many benefits since it is easy to access, low cost, and simple to use.