One of the standard procedures in gastrointestinal surgery is bowel part resection, which can be necessary for various reasons, such as an occurrence of a tumour. To perform this type of surgery successfully, tissue blood flow must be evaluated very clearly.Commonly, the most frequently used technique is the surgeon observing and making a macroscopic evaluation of intestine blood flow. Another approach is to use the indocyanine green (ICG) imaging method, which is sufficiently effective but quite expensive. There are some other techniques, such as pulse oximetry, visible light spectrophotometry and laser Doppler flowmetry, which can theoretically be used for this purpose but further studies of their applicability are still needed (Urbanavičius et al 2011).The main object of this study is, therefore, to evaluate = infrared thermography and temperature recovery observation as a useful technique for assessing the superficial tissue blood flow and identification of the intestinal resection lines and subsequent anastomosis creation.
Infrared thermography backgroundIn the field of contemporary medicine, thermographic methods have a relatively wide application. They are used, for example, in the observation of neuropathies and ischemia in the limbs of diabetic patients (Hernandez-