Morphological Feature Extraction of Thermal Images for Thyroid Detection

Nowadays thyroid gland disorder is very common disease. More than one third of all women may be found to have at least one thyroid nodule disorder during their lifetime. Thyroid detection test is usually done by invasive and noninvasive methods. Invasive methods are traumatic methods and non-invasive methods like ultrasound and x-rays should not be used many time. Thyroid function tests (TFTs) is a collective term for blood tests used to check the function of the thyroid. This is invasive method to detect thyroid gland disease. TFTs may be requested if a patient is thought to suffer from hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism. This paper gives the state of the art of image processing techniques to detect the thyroid gland disease nontraumatically using Thermograph. Thermal Imaging is a technology that creates analyzes images by detecting the heat radiating from an object. We have proposed a system to detect the thyroid gland disease using thermograph. A hyperactive thyroid gland is a center of increased blood flow and chemical activity, so it a center of heat production that can be detected by thermal sensing. Temperature can be sensed using thermal camera FLIR-E30 with thermal sensitivity of 0.1°C with temperature range -20°C to +120°C