Infrared Thermography for Correlating Blood Pressure and Temperature

Infrared Thermography is a non-invasive clinical imaging procedure for detecting and monitoring several diseases and physical injuries by showing thermal abnormalities present in the body. This imaging procedure is done with the aid of a thermal camera. In the preliminary work, the main aim is to derive a correlation and an empirical relationship between temperature and blood pressure. The objective is to measure blood pressure using mercury sphygmomanometer and automatic sphygmomanometer; whereby diastolic and systolic pressures along with pulse is noted down. Two regions of interest in the forearm has to be defined where the variations in temperature with variations in blood pressure is noted as well as graphically plotted. Also, a scatter plot is plotted to determine and find out the empirical equation correlating the blood pressure and temperature. Blood pressure correlation with temperature is done for the whole population of the study set consisting of 20 subjects within the age group of 18-35 years [with men (10 in number) and female (10 in number)].The key findings of this work are that temperature at the regions of interest increases with an increase in blood pressure and vice versa. And, during inflation and deflation i.e., with increasing and decreasing blood pressure, males showed higher temperature variation than females at both R1 and R2 region. The future works that can be predicted to happen based on the preliminary work is the development of an IR based sensor which would assist in measuring the blood pressure of a body from the surface of the skin, in a non-contact manner.