A non invasive investigatory study on thyroid dysfunction

Abstract

Thyroid is a bilobed butterfly like organ situated on the front of the neck secreting vital hormones, T3 and T4. Due to the life style changes, the incidences of hypothyridism and hyperthyroidism is in increasing trend. Thyroid hormone has a number of important functions involving the growth and metabolism of the body especially in children. This hormone plays a major role in regulating the growth factor of a human body which makes it a highly significant one. Initially two simple methods are devised to determine the thyroid newlinedysfunction. The principle of IR Light Emitting Diode technique is to transmit the IR rays of 750nm and 800nm wavelength, which after reflecting from the soft tissues of the finger is received by the photo diode. Based upon this absorbance level values of the output, it is displayed in the liquid crystal display as normal or hyper or hypothyroidism. An exhaustive study using FLIR E60 camera is used to capture the thermal images which are then used for further exploration. Obtained thermal images are processed with the help of MATLAB software. Here, the area of interest is neck region and is manually cropped from the original input image. This cropped image is then applied to the median filter to reduce the salt and newlinepepper noise. After this filtering process the image is subsequently analyzed in three planes namely red, green and the blue plane. Among these, the blue plane is to be considered for a detailed evaluation of the temperature distribution. In pursuit of precision, each of these cropped images are divided into a 16X16 matrix giving us a total of 256 blocks newline newline