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