Role of Active Thermography for Thermal Evaluation of Varying Subcutaneous Fat Thickness

Modeling based feasibility study has been performed on vascularized human skin model with the motivation to device a non-invasive and non-contact novel methodology to characterize the increasing subcutaneous fat thickness. The study considers an integrated model for human skin exposed to natural convection, local radiation, and evaporation due to sweating during thermal recovery phase after removal of undercooled condition. The aim of the present study is to use the conventional active mode of thermal imaging to characterize the change in subcutaneous fat thickness. It has been found that, the present methodology is fast and has the inherent ability to characterize the subsurface variation based on the obtained surface thermal response. A detailed parametric study on different physiological parameters of the human skin revealed that, the major variation in the thermal pattern at the skin surface is contributed due to the change in fat thickness. It has been observed that, the typical temperature resolution of thermal camera should be less than or equal to 1 C for the evaluation of increasing fat thickness. The study presents a novel thermal evaluation methodology for the estimation of differential change in the fat thickness using a dynamic thermal imaging technique.