Infrared Thermography as a Visualization Technique for Light Muscle Pathologies

摘要

Infrared thermography is a technology that has long been employed in the clinical environment, and its application has been further extended in this sector on account of the technical advances of cameras and the increasing ease of acquiring a computer. With regard to the increased clinical use of this technology, it is very useful to apply this technique to the visualization of mild musculoskeletal pathologies due to its high capacity to produce increasingly sharp and exhaustive images as a result of the infrared radiation emitted (in this case by the patients), whilst modern equipment allows for assigning two pixels of different color at temperatures that differ by 0.01°C. In this case, the ability to transform the emission of infrared radiation from any body into an image-along with the various graphic patterns that can be observed-allows measurements such as temperature to provide information with very small gradients. A specific example of the utility of this technique will be described in this article, using a case of mild cervical injuries produced by a low-speed traffic accident, which would otherwise be difficult to objectify and evaluate using other techniques.