We cannot succeed in the battle against swine flu or any other infectious disease unless we use the best of biology, he added. This is what the study we are presenting today shows. We are all equipped with a natural indicator of temperature, a tool -- a tunnel of infrared light -- that provides a reliable measurement of body temperature, with much less variability than the face, forehead and neck. It can be an important weapon in our battle against the swine flu pandemic. It could help save many lives while avoiding crippling our economy due to healthy people unnecessarily being absent from work or not going out shopping because of a false fever.

For those who do become sick or hospitalized, besides monitoring during surgery, Dr. Abreu, explained that the BTT could offer continuous noninvasive temperature monitoring -- without the need for nurse intervention -- to detect infection early, thereby enabling the timely administration of therapy and preventing complications. Dr. Abreu, who is also Clinical Faculty in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, noted that hospital infections alone kill 100,000 patients annually in the U.S.

DETECTION OF INFRARED EMISSION

The research presented at ASA noted that a tunnel of infrared radiant energy exists between the fat-free (thermally conductive) skin at the supero-medial orbit (SMO) and the cavernous sinus around the hypothalamic thermoregulatory center. A thermal sensor placed on the skin of the SMO, which corresponds to the end of the BTT, enables the noninvasive measurement of core and intracranial temperatures.

The purpose of the study was to examine the reliability of temperature measurement on the face, forehead, neck and BTT using detection of thermal infrared (IR) emission. The forehead showed low IR emission and great variability in size and location of IR. In each radiant image, regardless of when the image was taken or what the subjects were exposed to, the area with the highest IR emission and surface temperature corresponded to the BTT. The BTT also had the least variability of IR emission.

The identification of an intracranial pathway that is insulated for heat retention and whose distal end is uniquely designed for energy transfer allows a surface sensor to view and virtually sit ™ on a beam of infrared light coming from the hypothalamic region of the brain, said Dr. Silverman.

In addition to Dr. Silverman and Dr. Abreu, other authors on the study included Ala S. Haddadin, M.D., F.C.C.P., Tyler Silverman, B.S., and William Amalu, Ph.D.

Under the leadership of Dr. Silverman, the team of Dr. Abreu, Dr. Haddadin and Mr. Silverman have presented three other studies on the BTT in the past three years. The Yale research group is in the process of submitting to a major scientific journal a multi-center investigation, which includes Dr. Ricardo L. Smith, Professor and Chairman, Department of Anatomy, School of Medicine of the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Dr. Airdem Assis and Dr. Marcos Hott of Embrapa, National Cattle Research Center of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock; Dr. Claudio Campi Castro, Chief, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Section, Heart Institute, University of Sao Paulo Medical School, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Roger Titone of Brain Tunnelgenix Technologies Corp., Tiffin, IA; and Dr. Michael F. Bergeron, Director, National Institute for Athletic Health & Performance, Sanford USD Medical Center, Sioux Falls, SD.

Additionally, BTT research has been carried out in collaboration with Dr. Robert Gochman and Dr. Alexander Arroyo, Department of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine, Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New Hyde Park, NY, and Dr. Joseph McIsaac, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Hartford, CT.

Source: Centers for Disease Control