Reliability of three methods of computer-aided thermal pattern analysis.
BACKGROUND
The objective of this study was to assess three methods of computer-aided thermal pattern analysis for a) examiner reliability, b) inter-method differences, and c) determine which method yields the highest percent-similarity between paired test-retest scans.


METHODS
Three examiners compared two sets of thermal scans from the same 30 subjects using three different methods of scan alignment. The results were evaluated by the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, at the 5% level of significance.


RESULTS
Intra and inter-examiner ICC scores for all methods were acceptable (> 0.75). There were no statistically significant differences (at the Bonferroni-corrected level of significance of 0.0004%) in percent similarity of the scans between the three methods


CONCLUSIONS
The results contribute evidence to the reliability of TPC program software. Manually aligning the readings plays an important role in obtaining precise TPC percent-similarities.
Hart
John
J
Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic, Spartanburg, South Carolina 29304, USA. jhart@sherman.edu
Omolo
Bernard
B
Boone
W R
WR
Brown
Charlene
C
Ashton
Andrew
A