Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is a highly infectious disease caused by a coronavirus. Screening to detect potential SARS infected subject with elevated body temperature plays an important role in preventing the spread of SARS. The use of infrared (IR) thermal imaging cameras has thus been proposed as a non-invasive, speedy, cost-effective and fairly accurate means for mass blind screening of potential SARS infected persons. Infrared thermography provides a digital image showing temperature patterns. This has been previously utilized in the detection of inflammation and nerve dysfunctions. It is believed that IR cameras may potentially be used to detect subjects with fever, the cardinal symptom of SARS and avian influenza. The accuracy of the infrared system can, however, be affected by human, environmental, and equipment variables. It is also limited by the fact that the thermal imager measures the skin temperature and not the body core temperature. Thus, the use of IR thermal systems at various checkpoints for mass screening of febrile persons is scientifically unjustified such as what is the false negative rate and most importantly not to create false sense of security. This paper aims to study the effectiveness of infrared systems for its application in mass blind screening to detect subjects with elevated body temperature. For this application, it is critical for thermal imagers to be able to identify febrile from normal subjects accurately. Minimizing the number of false positive and false negative cases improves the efficiency of the screening stations. False negative results should be avoided at all costs, as letting a SARS infected person through the screening process may result in potentially catastrophic results. Hitherto, there is lack of empirical data in correlating facial skin with body temperature. The current work evaluates the correlations (and classification) between the facial skin temperatures to the aural temperature using the artificial neural network approach to confirm the suitability of the thermal imagers for human temperature screening. We show that the Train Back Propagation and Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) can form an opinion about the type of network that is better to complement thermogram technology in fever diagnosis to drive a better parameters for reducing the size of the neural network classifier while maintaining good classification accuracy.
The method of primary processing of thermograms obtained using small-size thermal imagers
