A low cost thermal imaging system for medical diagnostic applications

Abstract

This paper presents a low cost thermal imaging system for medical diagnostic applications. Available systems are expensive and are mostly meant for industrial applications. The implementation begins with a basic thermal array which detects the infrared radiations from the human body part and then converts them to electronic signal. Scene captured by the sensor is represented as a matrix. Each element of matrix represents a temperature value. Temperature is calculated and a pseudo color image is developed with the help of a microcontroller. This system can be used in wide applications in the field of medicine such as detection of breast cancer, fever screening, thyroid disease detection, early detection of risk for diabetic peripheral neuropathy, Reynaud's phenomenon, orthopedics etc.