USING DYNAMIC INFRARED IMAGING TO DETECT MELANOMA: EXPERIMENTS ON A TISSUE-MIMICKING PHANTOM

In this paper we investigated how the surface temperature distribution reflects the properties of malignant lesions such as the metabolic activity level, the location, and size of lesions, by conducting an extensive experimental study on a skin tissue mimicking phantom developed to validate our numerical model. Experiments were conducted for different dimensions and depths of the thermistor simulating the heat generating lesion. The rate of heat generation was also varied. We found that times immediately after the removal of the cooling stress (up to 2 minutes) are critical for the identification of masses beneath the surface. Additionally, the results indicate that the surface temperature distributions are sensitive to thermistor size. These findings are consistent with the findings of our numerical model.