Thermography in the Diagnosis of Headache

Abstract

We reviewed thermograms of 993 suitable patients with migraine with and without aura, chronic daily headache, cluster headache, posttraumatic headache, and a variety of other headache types. Eight hundred fifty-five (86.1%) had abnormal thermograms usually characterized by decreased supraorbital thermal emission. Six hundred ninety-four (69.9%) of 993 had migraine without aura of whom 593 (85.4%) had abnormal thermograms. Two hundred two (20.3%) of 993 had migraine with aura, of whom 180 (89.1%) had abnormal thermograms. Thirty of 35 (85.7%) patients with cluster headache, and 28 of 33 (84.8%) with posttraumatic headache had abnormal thermograms. Twenty-four of 29 (82.8%) of patients with various less common headaches and head pain syndromes had abnormal thermography. Previous studies have indicated that about 67 to 84% of patients with migraine have abnormal thermograms. Some reports have indicated fewer have thermal asymmetries in migraine without aura, and even fewer with "mixed or muscle contraction" headaches. Our study indicates a somewhat greater number of headache patients have abnormal thermograms than has generally been reported. We conclude digital infrared thermography is a useful diagnostic test in the management of headaches.

Use of infrared thermography to detect performance enhancing techniques in horses

“…Interest in the technology has resurfaced recently due to the development of more lightweight, portable, and user-friendly designs. In man, thermography has been used to detect nerve root irritation in lumbar disk herniation patients and the depth of cutaneous burns within the first 3 days following injury, the diagnosis of local radiation injuries and testicular tumours, assessment of temporomandibular disorders during orthodonic treatment, and in the evaluation of patients with chronic headaches (Thomas et al 1990; Ping and You 1993;Daneliia and Gotsadze 1995;Liddington and Shakespeare 1996;McBeth and Gratt 1996;Ford and Ford 1997;Koteles et al 1998). In horses, thermography has proven to be useful in the diagnosis, prognosis, and evaluation of soft tissue injury or disease, and in the evaluation of the more superficial orthopaedic lesions where the bone is covered by minimal soft tissues (Turner 1991;Marlin et al 1998).…”

Infrared Thermography in Pain Medicine

“…Then, in 1982, the US Food and Drug Administration approved IRT as an adjunctive screening tool of breast cancer, and up to now, there have been many studies regarding the usefulness of IRT in various areas such as complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) [5-7], postherpetic neuralgia [8], whiplash injury [9,10], inflammatory arthritis [11,12], temporo-mandibular joint disorder [13,14], headache [15,16], and myofascial pain syndrome [17,18]. The diseases where IRT can be used are presented in Table 1.…”

Effect of heart rate and respiratory rate on thermal infrared-imaging of the horse’s head

“…In addition to the examination protocols used in human medicine (Saxena 2007, Diakides and Bronzino 2012, Vollmer and Möllmann 2010 for minimising the influence of those parameters the following recommendations have been established: Waiting time for a period of rest in the room before IR-images are taken, shutting out the day light in the examination room, ambient temperature below the temperature limit for perspiring. To make the interpretation of IR-images more independent concerning the influence of ambient temperature and measurement errors of the IRcamera there are two possibilities: I) Calculating temperature differences between saggital-symmetrical anatomical regions (Ford et al 1997, Krogbeumker et al 2014) within one IR-image matrix data set or II) Calculating unilateral temperature differences between an anatomical reference region and an anatomical target region within one IR-image matrix data set. However, unilateral temperature differences eg.…”