Diagnosis and assessment of musculoskeletal injuries using thermography

There is no non-radiative modality that can assess the injuries to musculoskeletal/soft tissues. In this thesis work, thermal imaging is employed for assessment of musculoskeletal injuries. The prime focus of this work is to assess the injuries to knee area namely a). Knee Osteoarthritis and b). Total Knee Replacement. In Knee osteoarthritis, the health of cartilage present between the knee joint across the different grades were analysed using mean temperature of the joint. The mean temperature was calculated by extracting the region of interest from acquired thermal images using color segmentation technique. Besides this, the effect of well-known risk factors like age, BMI and duration of disease were analysed using 2-way ANOVA test. It was found that there is a significant mean temperature between grade 2 & 4; grade 3 & 4 but not between grade 2 & 3. The risk factors clearly affect the mean temperature of knee. In case of total knee replacement, the post-operative recovery of patients was analysed by capturing their thermal images on pre-operative day along with 2, 6, 15, 45, 90 day post-operatively. To validate the recovery, inflammatory markers like ESR and CRP were measured on the same days. At last mean differential temperature was correlated with the inflammatory markers. A very high correlation was observed of MDT with ESR and CRP. Post-operative raised temperature of knee was illustrated using qualitatively (using visual percentage of raised temperature) as well as quantitatively (Relative percentage of raised temperature). So, the results are very promising and supports the potential use of thermal imaging in assessing the post-operative recovery of TKR patients