THERMOTECHNICAL APPROACHES TO THE INVESTIGATION OF LOCAL INJURIES CAUSED BY IONIZING RADIATION

Abstract

Skin temperature has been used as an indicator of the physiological and pathological condition of the human body for centuries. The infrared (IR) thermogrammetry (TGM)/thermography gives new vistas for the transient skin surface temperature measurements, too. IR-TGM can also be advantageously applied in radiation biology for comparative and quantitative diagnostic investigations. In Hungary, the technique was first applied in 1984, when the authors published a case study on a local radiation injury [4] and suggested that both contact and infrared thermography were useful tools in detection of the areas of radiation injury. While in 1984 a serious injury of a hand (20-30 Gy, locally) was described, later [10,15] an injury caused by a much lower dose (1-2 Gy, locally) was reported when IR-TGM could still assist the diagnosis. The measurement results obtained enabled the authors to compare the radiation burden and the temperature distribution detected at the involved skin surface.