Skin Temperature Assessment During Lumbar Sympathetic Blocks by Infrared Thermography

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) is a pain disorder that can be triggered by injuries or surgery affecting most often limbs. Its multifaceted pathophysiology makes its diagnosis and treatment a challenging work. To reduce pain, patients diagnosed with CRPS commonly undergo sympathetic blocks which involves the injection of a local anesthetic drug around the nerves. Currently, this procedure is guided by fluoroscopy which occasionally is considered as little accurate. For this reason, the use of infrared thermography as a technique of support has been considered.In this work, thermal images of feet soles in patients with lower limbs CRPS undergoing lumbar sympathetic blocks were recorded and evaluated. The images were analyzed by means of a computer-aided intuitive software tool developed using MATLAB. This tool provides the possibility of editing regions of interest, extracting the most important information of these regions and exporting the results data to an Excel file.Clinical Relevance— The final purpose of this work is to value the potential of infrared thermography and the analysis of its images as an intraoperatory technique of support in lumbar sympathetic blocks in patients with lower limbs CRPS.