Infrared Thermal Imaging: A New Paradigm for Wound Care

Introduction: Wound care remains an unmet challenge, as over 8 million people in North America alone live with a chronic wound. Infrared thermal imaging (IRT) is a non-invasive imaging technique that has successfully been used in the past few years to assess a wound’s healing potential and its physiology.

Objective: To conduct a narrative review on the effectiveness of IRT for assessing a wound’s healing potential and its inflammatory or infectious status.

Methodology: A review of the literature was performed including papers on wound healing and IRT in the past 10 years. Papers describing how IRT was used to monitor a wound’s healing potential, its inflammatory status, or the presence of infection were included. The databases searched included Medline, PubMed, and Scopus. No restrictions on language were used.

Results: IRT was found to be effective for assessing a wound’s healing potential. Lower temperatures were correlated with decreased likelihood of attaining a complete wound closure, longer times to heal, and the need for surgical management, including amputation. IRT was also found to be prognostic for the treatment modality of wounds when categorized as conservative vs. surgical management. The main IRT features that predicted better healing potential were wounds with temperatures closer to that of uninjured skin and slightly warmer periwound areas.Increased temperatures in the periwound area were found to be associated with increased likelihood of infection, both in open and post-surgical infections. However, compared to the healing potential where a larger body of evidence was found, scientific papers describing the use of IRT for diagnosing wound infection were scarcer. As such, this is a significant gap in the literature that needs to be addressed.

Conclusion: IRT is a low-cost, highly effective tool for assessing and monitoring wounds. Its use should be an integral part of wound evaluations in the 21st century.