Abstract

Doc number: 162

Abstract

Introduction: Psoriasis arthritis (PsA) is a chronic inflammatory arthritis of joints of uncertain pathogenesis. PsA may lead to severe disabilities even in the absence of any clinical symptom. Therefore, PsA diagnosis in its early stages is critical.

Material and methods: This study uses Control System theory to model finger skin thermoregulatory processes overlying the hand joint in response to an isometric exercise. The proposed model is based on a homeostatic negative feedback loop characterized by four distinct parameters that describe how the control mechanisms are activated and maintained. Thermal infrared imaging was used to record a total of 280 temperature curves of 14 finger joints for each of 11 PsA patients and 9 healthy controls.

Result and conclusion: PsA patients presented delayed and prolonged re-warming processes characterized by the undershoot onset after the end of the isometric exercise followed by a faster temperature increase. Region classification on the basis of the model parameters demonstrated that the interphalageal joint region of thumb better discriminates between patients and controls, providing 100% true-positive discrimination for PsA affected regions and 88.89% of correct classification of healthy regions. Even proved over a limited number of subjects, the proposed method may provide useful hints for early differential diagnosis in the IR assessment of PsA disease.

Details

Title
Functional-thermoregulatory model for the differential diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis
Author
Ismail, Enas; Capo, Alessandra; Amerio, Paolo; Merla, Arcangelo
Publication year
2014
Publication date
2014
Publisher
BioMed Central
e-ISSN
1475925X
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1648432172
Copyright
© 2014 Ismail et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.