What is Thermography?

Thermography — or more accurately said for our purpose — Digital Infrared Thermal Imaging (DITI), is an industry technique to capture remotely objects’ surface temperatures. Most of us probably have seen this method at least in the movies when somebody holds a “binocular” and “sees” people in the darkness of the night. Those binocular-looking devices are nothing but an Infrared Camera that detects different surface temperatures of objects (being a human, an animal or any other object). Objects in nature are exposed to sun infrared radiation and emit themselves at different rates the infrared energy. The “Infrared Cameras” read with a high degree of accuracy these emitted infrared temperatures off of the surface of an object and the read temperatures can be plotted (with the help of a computer) to “see” the whole or part of the object.

The human body constantly emits infrared energy from the skin surface. The skin is in “communication” with every part of our body through our Nervous System. The “abnormalities” of the body translate into different skin temperatures.

Let us take the “breast thermography” as an example. The infrared camera takes a picture from your breast area (from a few feet away). The camera is capable of reading the temperatures of hundreds of single points of the breast surface. In case of a developing tumor (even in the very earliest stages) the skin temperature will rise as the new tumor cells build their “own” blood vessels, needed for their nourishment, causing a rise of temperature on the skin (via Sympathetic Nervous System). This simple process is so nothing more than taking a photograph with an infrared camera, without a contact to the body and without “sending” anything to it and can be used to monitor the breast (or other parts of the body) of women and men at any age group with zero side effects.

The thermography principle is based on the fact that our Sympathetic Nervous System responds to “physiological” changes anywhere in the body. Unlike other screening methods that target “structural” changes — such as formation of a tumor which has to be large enough to be detected, requiring several years up to a decade — thermography targets the “path” the tumor has to go from a few cells to a large detectable tumor, i.e. the physiological changes in the body that appear parallel to the abnormality formation.