Abstract
Melanoma incidence and the lifetime risk are increasing at an alarming rate in the USA and worldwide. In order to improve survival rates, the goal is to detect melanoma at an early stage. Accurate, sensitive and reliable quantitative diagnostic tools can reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies, the associated morbidity and the costs of care, in addition to improving survival rates. The recently introduced quantitative dynamic infrared imaging system, ‘Quantification Analysis of Induced Thermography’ measures differences in the infrared emission between healthy tissue and a lesion during the thermal recovery process after removal of a cooling stress. Results from a clinical study suggest that the temperature of cancerous lesions is higher during the first 45–60 s of thermal recovery than the temperature of benign pigmented lesions. This small temperature difference can be measured by modern infrared cameras and serve as an indicator for melanoma in modern quantitative melanoma detectors.
Acknowledgements
Images and photographs for this review were taken or contributed by Rajeev Hatwar, Tze-Yuan Cheng and Muge Pirtini Cetingul.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
The author’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health NCI (grant no. R01CA161265), the National Science Foundation (grant no. 0651981) and the Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust through the Cancer Center of the Johns Hopkins University. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.