Skin temperature over an artificial heat source implanted in man (applied to IR thermography)

Abstract

The medical application of infrared thermography makes use of the skin temperature as an indication of an underlying pathological process. In order to study the relation between the heat production from a source in living tissue and the overlying skin temperature, artificial heat sources were implanted subcutaneously in human volunteers. The experimental results show that a detectable surface temperature increase over the heat sources presupposes high power output or superficial implantation. The effect of forced convective heat loss from the skin surface and lowered ambient temperature was studied. Forced convection markedly decreased the temperature contrast. An implicit conclusion from experimental and theoretical work is that a localized 'hot spot' can only exceptionally be attributed to metabolic heat production conducted to the skin surface from a buried pathological process. The thermal pattern over a breast tumour, a septic or aseptic inflammation or a tissue injury mainly reflects the vascular reaction.

A basic step toward understanding skin surface temperature distributions caused by internal heat sources

“…Additional experimental agreement is observed in an experiment (Nilsson 1975, p 377) that used human forearms. It was found that W is independent of T a (at 17 • C and 23 • C) and that an increase of h eff (air flow rate at 0 and 2 m s −1 ) causes a decrease of W. The decrease of W observed in the experiment is larger than that shown in figure 10(b) because the values of D used in the experiment are less than the default value of the current study.…”

Biothermomechanical behavior of skin tissue

“…Most of the earlier studies emphasized on the study of skin temperature around heat sources for tumor diagnose [76][77][78], which is based on observations of Lawson [79] that the skin temperature over a malignant tumor is higher than that of surrounding skin due to increased blood flow in tumor.…”

Skin Temperature Over a Heat Source: Experimental Studies and Theoretical Calculations*

“…Silicon tube A spherical titanium heat source with a central temperature measuring thermistor and a heat coil was developed for implantation in animals and man (FIGURE 1). 6 The electrical leads to the heat source were encapsulated in a silicon tube. The heat sources were implanted in a passive state and allowed to heal in the desired location.…”