THE USE OF INFRARED THERMOGRAPHY IN MODERN MEDICINE (Literature Review)

The article provides a systematic review on the recent applications of the infrared thermography in medicine reported by Russian and foreign researchers. Advances in IRT technology and equipment, resulted in significant improvement of thermo-images quality and opened new opportunities for the practical application. Application possibilities of infrared thermography in diagnostics and treatment of diseases in different branches of medicine including traumatology and orthopedics, sport medicine, therapy and endocrinology, neurology, neonatology, diagnosis of vessels disorders and oncology are demonstrated in the article. The description of advantages (such as noninvasiveness, safety, relatively low cost and the ability to reveal pathologies on early stages) and disadvantages (insufficiently automated diagnostic type, subjective interpretation of data) of this method have been made. Perspectives of its development (creation of mathematical algorithms for automatic processing of thermo- images) and its introduction in to clinical practice have been analyzed. The use of consistent autoprograms for the thermographic images analysis allows to avoiding subjective interpretation of thermogram data. Nowadays, automatic methods of analysis are actively developed and put into practice, in particular, achievements in development of automatic image recognition algorithms allowed to solve problems of thermal images, automate cancer diagnostics.