On Temperature Variation of the Diabetic Foot

Teixeira, Ana; Pereira, Ana I.

This work aims to give an additional contribute to the development of an alternative diagnostic method to be applied to early detection of foot pathology in Diabetes Mellitus individuals. In this work, the main concepts related to the topic under study are introduced and a framework concerning the use of thermography to evaluate the temperature distribution in the feet is presented. Additionally, in this work, a mathematical model to characterise the plantar temperature distribution variation is presented and an optimization programming problem based on the nonlinear least squares approach is proposed. Some considerations about the two global non-linear optimization metaheuristic methods used to solve this model, namely a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm and a Hybrid Simulated Annealing, are also described. Thermal plantar images of non diabetic and diabetic individuals are used to test the approach. The numerical results obtained with both methods for the different regions of each foot are presented and analysed; the best results were obtained with the Hybrid Genetic Algorithm. Some preliminary conclusions were made.