Infrared thermal imaging monitoring on hands when performing repetitive tasks: An experimental study

Current Use of Infrared Thermography in Orthopaedic and Bone or Joint Trauma Patients-Can We Identify Postoperative Infection? A Narrative Systematic Review

Aim and background

Technological advances have made infrared thermography (IRT) sensitive, noncontact, and low cost for medical applications and it is used in a range of fields. A widening body of research has investigated IRT in the orthopaedic setting, including the investigation of orthopaedic infection. Infrared thermography could provide a rapid, low-cost, objective, noncontact technique to aid in the diagnosis of orthopaedic infections.

Methods

Electronic searches of MEDLINE, CINAHL, and EMBASE from 2000 to 2024 were made. The search strategy aimed to include all studies in adults investigating the use of IRT in orthopaedic and bone or joint trauma patients and those studies which provide baseline values, including in patients with infection. Articles were screened by title and abstract by two authors. Bias was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale tool. Studies were heterogeneous; therefore, results were summarised in tables and presented as a narrative synthesis.

Results

The search identified 36 studies. Studies have shown that IRT is useful in fracture or soft tissue diagnosis, detecting periprosthetic infection, and it may have a role in screening healthy subjects. There is still considerable variance in the application of IRT in the trauma and orthopaedic setting.

Conclusion

Infrared thermography is sensitive to skin temperature changes in infected limbs following orthopaedic surgery and may be used as a low-cost, noncontact, irradiation-free screening tool to identify orthopaedic infection in the future. Future studies should identify the cost effectiveness of IRT in clinical practice. Barriers include the low incidence of orthopaedic infection and large number of confounders that can affect IRT readings.

Clinical significance

Infrared thermography can provide rapid information that may be a useful adjunct in the emergency department or outpatient clinics to diagnose a range of orthopaedic conditions, including infection. Current research has yet to demonstrate clinical significance.

How to cite this article

Watts AT, Boyle AMP, Kutuzov V, et al. Current Use of Infrared Thermography in Orthopaedic and Bone or Joint Trauma Patients-Can We Identify Postoperative Infection? A Narrative Systematic Review. Strategies Trauma Limb Reconstr 2024;19(3):141-148.

Theory and applications of InfraRed and thermal image analysis in ergonomics research

Designing products and services to fit human needs, wants and lifestyle require meaningful data. With Industry 4.0 and the internet of things, we have many ways to capture data using sensors and other means. InfraRed (IR) cameras are quite ubiquitous, especially for screening illness and wellness. They can provide a wealth of data on different objects and even people. However, their use has been limited due to processing complexities. With reducing cost and increasing accuracy of IR cameras, access to thermal data is becoming quite widespread, especially in medicine and people-related applications. These cameras have software to help process the data, with a focus on qualitative analyses and rather primitive quantitative analyses. In ergonomics, data from multiple users are essential to make reasonable predictions for a given population. In this study, using 4 simple experiments, several quantitative analysis techniques such as simple statistics, multivariate statistics, geometric modeling, and Fourier series modeling are applied to IR images and videos to extract essential user and population data. Results show that IR data can be useful to provide user and population data that are important for design. More research in modeling IR data and application software is needed for the increased application of IR information in ergonomics applications.