The role of thermography in assessment of wounds. A scoping review

?With this scoping review, we aim to map and summarize what has been reported on thermography used to assess signs of inflammation in humans and animals with surgical or traumatic wounds.?A pattern seen from mapping the available evidence is that a healing wound will, over time, normalize in temperature and if infection occurs in a wound during healing, the temperature will rise above the "inflammation level." In other words, sudden temperature elevation in a wound should raise concerns of infection. This trend aligns with the general understanding of when to suspect infection clinically, but from the available literature, it is still not possible to set a specific temperature threshold value to differentiate between inflammation and infection.?Across diverse and explorative sources, we found a trend that wounds are warmer than non-injured skin and that this temperature rise is detectable with different modern thermographic cameras under pragmatic conditions (equal to bedside examination). This finding aligns with previously published literature where thermography has been used to assess burn wounds, diabetic foot complications and other inflammatory conditions without wounds.?By this review the available literature was mapped and grouped, and trends was revealed but since the reporting is inconsistent and the literature is diverse, firm evidence for introduction thermography for infection surveillance of surgical wounds is missing.?This scoping review revealed that modern thermographic cameras might be a promising tool for the clinician to quickly quantify the temperature pattern of surgical wounds to distinguish between inflammation and infection.