Low-Cost Active Thermography using Cellphone Infrared Cameras: from Early Detection of Dental Caries to Quantification of THC in Oral Fluid

Active thermography (AT) is a widely studied non-destructive testing method for the characterization and evaluation of biological and industrial materials. Despite its broad range of potential applications, commercialization and wide-spread adaption of AT has long been impeded by the cost and size of infrared (IR) cameras. In this paper, we demonstrate that this cost and size limitation can be overcome using cell-phone attachment IR cameras. A software development kit (SDK) is developed that controls camera attributes through a simple USB interface and acquires camera frames at a constant frame rate up to 33 fps. To demonstrate the performance of our low-cost AT system, we report and discuss our experimental results on two high impact potential applications. The first set of experiments is conducted on a dental sample to investigate the clinical potential of the developed low-cost technology for detecting early dental caries, while the second set of experiments is conducted on the oral-fluid based lateral flow immunoassay to determine the viability of our technology for detecting and quantifying cannabis consumption at the point-of-care. Our results suggest achievement of reliable performance in the low-cost platform, comparable to those of costly and bulky research-grade systems, paving the way for translation of AT techniques to market.