Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

12-2013

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair

Farag, Aly A.

Subject

Diagnostic Imaging; Blood flow--Measurement; Infrared imaging

Abstract

Computer vision is a field that includes methods for processing, analyzing, acquiring and understanding images to produce numerical or symbolic information to develop methodologies and solutions for many problems in many fields. Here the concept of computer vision is being used for understanding certain human physiology and behaviors using thermal imaging alone or in conjunction with other imaging modalities. The applications of this work span a wide range of studies in human-machine interfacing vis-à-vis feedback controls that can be used to remotely determine whether a patient is in need of medical assistance or to help integrate young children with learning challenges into a public classroom setting that can require monitoring vital signs and physiological cues without the need for contact-based sensors such as electrocardiogram (ECG) or electroencephalogram (EEG), which limit a subject’s physical capabilities during operational scenarios. In this thesis, a general framework is proposed to find an easy way to measure the blood flow using thermal camera to help detecting cots and vascular diseases (Venous disease, Arterial disease). In this thesis, a general framework is proposed to use a thermal image based measurement technique for the volumetric flow rate of a liquid inside a thin tube. This technique makes use of the convection heat transfer dependency between the flow rate and the temperature of the flowing liquid along the tube. The proposed method can be applied to diagnose superficial venous disease non-invasively by measuring the volumetric blood flow rate from a FLIR LWIR single thermal image (Mahmoud et al., 13).

Download

Share

COinS