Non‐invasive assessment of knee osteoarthritis patients using thermal imaging

Abstract

Abstract Radiography is a widely used method for grading and tracking the anatomical changes in knee osteoarthritis (OA) patients. The ease of thermography in mapping functional information via the skin temperature (Tsk) helps in the diagnosis of various musculoskeletal diseases. There is a significant involvement of soft tissues in knee OA due to the complex osteoligamentous degeneration, which may affect the knee Tsk. A total of 62 patients with knee OA were analysed using thermography. The mean Tsk was computed by extracting the region of interest from the acquired thermal images using an automatic segmentation technique for frontal, lateral, and medial views. The mean Tsk for grade 1, 2, 3 and 4 were 30.96 ± 0.59, 31.56 ± 0.79, 31.40 ± 1.22, 32.20 ± 0.70 ˚C respectively. A significant temperature difference was found between grade 2 and 4 (p = 0.02, p = 0.018), grade 3 and 4 (p = 0.03, p = 0.02) for frontal and lateral views; whereas no significant difference was found between grade 2 and 3. Further, 2‐way ANOVA test showed that risk factors (like age, BMI and duration of disease) do affect the mean Tsk significantly with a p‐value of 0.0003, 0.02, and 0.008.

Keywords

• Biothermics
• Optical and laser radiation (medical uses)
• X‐rays and particle beams (medical uses)
• Patient diagnostic methods and instrumentation
• Optical, image and video signal processing
• Optical and laser radiation (biomedical imaging/measurement)