Development of a Thermographic Database with Images of the Vulva

Abstract

This work aims to present a thermographic database of healthy vulva images and to explain the entire process of acquisition, processing, and analysis of the thermograms and other non-image information. We performed thermographic acquisitions of the vulva of 86 asymptomatic women and, after pre-processing and analyzing the thermograms, we obtained a total of 59 women with viable thermograms. To ensure we obtained at least one viable thermogram per women and to avoid loss of information due to human error, multiple acquisitions were made for each woman resulting in a total of 113 viable thermograms. All 113 thermograms were analyzed to guarantee that all the information obtained was included in the database. In this way, each thermogram was sectioned in 6 ROIs and the descriptive statistics were computed for each one. We identify the major difficulties of this process and present solutions for them.