The Digest | New Jersey Magazine
Issue link: https://magazines.vuenj.com/i/1369261
T hursday April 15 marked two-weeks since I received my second Pfizer shot. I am, as the kids say, officially double-vaxxed. To celebrate my newfound immunity, I had lunch with friends on the patio of a local Italian spot down the street from my apartment. "Can I do a temperature check on you guys before I seat you?" the hostess asked upon our arrival. "Of course," we said in a chorus. What followed was a routine we've all become accustomed to performing over the last year. One by one, my friends and I approached the hostess and bent our heads somberly as if greeting a foreign dignitary, while she pointed a magic temperature gun an inch away from our foreheads. When it was my turn to stare at my shoes for seven seconds, I finally expressed a thought I'd kept inside my brain for months. "I have no idea how this thing takes my temperature." "Neither do I," the hostess responded. A quick google search summoned a term I only kind of knew: thermal imaging. How exactly thermal imaging works is complex, but in its most simple terms, a thermal camera allows you to see heat radiating off the object or person emitting it. Thermal imaging detects internal body temperature by looking at infrared light. While infrared light is totally invisible to the human eye, thermal cameras can detect and measure it. Infrared light emitting from colder temperatures often shows up on thermal images as a shade of blue, purple, or green, while warmer temperatures look red, orange, or yellow. The hosts and hostesses taking our temperatures at the doors of restaurants across America are utilizing a very useful kind of thermal imaging — one that looks at the infrared light on our foreheads, calculates our internal temperature and reads it back to the host or hostess as a number. But doctors and nurses are using thermal imaging too, and for much more complex diagnostic work than a routine temperature check. Thermal imaging can be a useful tool for breast cancer screenings. A picture of the breast is taken with a thermal camera in order to create a kind of heat map. When a cancerous growth develops, there is often an excessive formation of blood vessels and inflammation around that breast tissue that shows up on an infrared image as a higher skin temperature. Doctors can see that glow on a heat map and can target it for future diagnostic tests like biopsies. The appeal of this technique — which is probably obvious for anyone who's had a mammogram — is that it is noninvasive. In fact, it is a non-contact procedure all together. Thermal images are taken much like regular photographs, meaning the thermal photographer needs to be some distance away from the patient in order to conduct the test. In my research on thermal imaging, I learned that this technology has recently been utilized to detect and treat vein disease. One of the doctors at the forefront of using thermal imaging for vein diagnosis is Steven Elias, MD, director of the Center for Vein Disease at Englewood Health and Medical Center. "It's quick — as quick as taking a picture of the leg. We take a picture of the front, the side and the back, and within a few minutes we determine whether or not a patient has abnormal veins," Elias said. Elias explained that vein disease is typically detected V U E N J .C O M 155