Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC) is a devastating intestinal disease associated with a high rate of mortality and long-term
morbidity. Treatments can be successful if NEC is diagnosed early, but no reliable methods exist. Infrared imaging can
detect tissue inflammation and thus has the potential to be an early diagnostic tool for NEC. Infants with no clinical or
radiographic signs of NEC, and a group of infants with evidence of at least Bell’s Stage 2 NEC were enrolled in our
study. Infants underwent bedside infrared imaging for 60 seconds. The dataset consists of twenty normal infants and nine
infants with NEC. In early work, in infants with NEC, the upper-to-lower (UL) region temperatures differed
significantly, where no significant difference in the UL region was found in normal infants. No significant difference
was found in left-to-right (LR) region temperatures for both groups. The decision tree classifier produced good results in
terms of specificity, sensitivity, and standard deviation for ten trials. Results for the medians were: 91%+/-0.07%;
84%+/-18%; and for the means they were: 86%+/-0.04%; 79%+/-21% [1]. In this work, we assessed the impact of image
enhancement in discriminating between infants with NEC and those without. The approaches explored were: (i) noise
reduction; (ii) background removal; and (iii) contrast enhancement. Preliminary results show marked improvement in
detecting infants with NEC. Future work will automate the analysis and carry-out a prospective study to attempt
detecting NEC at earlier stages. Other image analysis techniques will be tested to enhance the performance of our new
diagnostic tool.
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