Best Paper Award at OTCBVS07
According to the reviews, the paper entitled "Thermal Imaging of the Superficial Temporal Artey: An Arterial Pulse Recovery Model" by Sergey Chekmenev, Aly Farag and Edward Essock from University of Louisville, received the best paper award in OTCBVS2007.
Sergey Chekmenev, Riad Hammoud, Aly Farag and Ioannis Pavlidis (from left to right)
Thermal Imaging of the Supercial Temporal Artery: An Arterial Pulse Recovery
Model
Abstract
We present a novel model1 for measurement of the arterial pulse from the Supercial Temporal Artery (STA) using passive thermal Infra Red (IR) sensors. The proposed approach has a physical and physiological basis and as such is of fundamental nature. Thermal IR camera is used to capture the heat pattern from supercial arteries, and a blood vessel model is used to describe the pulsatile nature of the blood ow. A multresolution wavelet-based signal analysis approach is used to extract the arterial pulse waveform, which lends itself to various physiological measurements. We validate the results using a traditional contact vital-sign monitor as a ground truth. Eight people of different age, race and gender have been tested in our study consistent with IRB approval. The resultant arterial pulse waveforms exactly matched the ground-truth readings. The essence of our approach is the automatic detection of Region Of arterial pulse Measurement (ROM), from which the arterial pulse waveform is extracted. To the best of our knowledge, the correspondence between non-contact thermal IR imaging based measurements of the arterial pulse in the time domain and traditional contact approaches has never been reported in the literature. (download the full paper)