Spatial temperature monitoring of preterm infants using a multi-modal camera setup

Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing, vol. 64, pp. 2189–2208

Abstract

Accurate and reliable skin temperature monitoring is critical for the thermoregulation of premature infants, but current methods using wired sensors are invasive and prone to error. Infrared thermography offers a non-invasive, wireless alternative to current wired temperature monitoring methods. This work presents a novel non-contact system for monitoring skin temperature of premature infants in closed incubators using infrared thermography. To enable temperature monitoring of specific body parts, an automated body part segmentation model was developed. The multimodal U-Net incorporated color and long-wave infrared image data. Transfer learning and data augmentation techniques improved the performance of the model, resulting in an average Intersection over Union of 0.77 across all body parts (head, torso, arms, and legs). To ensure the accuracy of the thermal data itself, a novel temperature correction algorithm was developed. This compensated for systematic errors caused by factors such as an infrared window, reflections from incubator walls, and camera drift. The algorithm achieved a mean absolute error of 0.17 [Formula: see text]C and a maximum error of 0.83 [Formula: see text]C when validated against a blackbody reference. By combining these steps, our system extracts spatial temperature using a percentile-based method, resulting in a mean absolute error of 0.41 [Formula: see text]C compared to a reference adhesive temperature sensor on the torso. The analysis revealed that the torso and arms provided more robust central and peripheral temperature measurements than the head and legs. These results demonstrate the potential of this non-contact system for accurate and reliable clinical temperature monitoring in premature infants, offering significant benefits in terms of patient comfort, reduced risk of infection and improved workflow for medical staff.

Authors 9

1. Florian Voss corresponding Aachen Medical Information Technology (MedIT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Medical Information Technology, Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany. voss@hia.rwth-aachen.de

2. Simon Lyra Aachen Medical Information Technology (MedIT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Medical Information Technology, Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany

3. Celine Noehl Aachen Medical Information Technology (MedIT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Medical Information Technology, Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany

4. Milian Brasche Aachen Section of Neonatology

   RWTH Aachen University · Universitätsklinikum Aachen

   Affiliation as printed

   Section of Neonatology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, 52074, Aachen, Germany

5. Konrad Heimann Aachen Section of Neonatology

   RWTH Aachen University · Universitätsklinikum Aachen

   Affiliation as printed

   Section of Neonatology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, 52074, Aachen, Germany

6. Luisa Hensel Aachen Section of Neonatology

   RWTH Aachen University · Universitätsklinikum Aachen

   Affiliation as printed

   Section of Neonatology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, 52074, Aachen, Germany

7. Thorsten W Orlikowsky Aachen Section of Neonatology

   RWTH Aachen University · Universitätsklinikum Aachen

   Affiliation as printed

   Section of Neonatology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, 52074, Aachen, Germany

8. Steffen Leonhardt Aachen Medical Information Technology (MedIT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Medical Information Technology, Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany

9. Markus Lueken Aachen Medical Information Technology (MedIT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Medical Information Technology, Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany