Novel analytical approach for estimation of thermal diffusivity and effusivity for detection of osteoporosis

Abstract

Infrared thermography is a full field, non-contact inexpensive, patient friendly and safe imaging modality for estimation of thermo-physical properties of various biomaterials. Among the widely used thermal wave imaging modalities, recently proposed frequency modulated thermal wave imaging technique gained importance due to its quantitative characterization capabilities along with its deeper subsurface visualizationabilities. This work highlights a novel analytical analysis for three dimensional Fourier heat diffusion equationby consideringinternal heat generation.An aperiodic pulse compression favorable thermal wave imaging method is proposed for estimation of thermo-physical properties of bone for identification of severity of osteoporosis. Effect of osteoporosis on thermo-physical properties such as thermal effusivity and diffusivity has been studied. Further proposed analytical approach has been validated by results obtained from the commercially available finite element based COMSOL software.