Using heat to detect skin cancer

03/06/18 19:52

With skin cancer being such a major health issue in New Zealand it is always pleasant to read people are working on ways to improve challenges in the diagnosis of this disease.

In a recently published paper in the journal Skin Research and Technology, Magalhaes and colleagues reviewed the literature to date on the use of infrared thermal imaging for the diagnosis of skin cancer. This picks up subtle differences in temperature between benign and malignant skin lesions, presumably based on increased blood flow in the malignant lesions.

This non-invasive technology may be a promising tool for the identification of early skin cancer, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.