Thermo-Iewy - USB 2.0 Thermo Camera for the Medical Industry

Thermo-Iewy - USB 2.0 Thermo Camera for the Medical Industry
Learn on yet another successful integration of our products

Established in 1980 in the south of Italy as a Tecnap Group subsidiary, Electronics Devices Power srl. (EDP) develops, designs and manufactures static medium to high power Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) products. EDP's UPS solutions are predominately targeted for emergency devices, elevators and innovative electro-medical products.

For the electro-medical market, EDP has recently announced the Thermo-Iewy, an infrared camera used for medical purposes, in particular for the early detection of cancer.

EDP Camera

Temperature is a sensible indicator of the human functional condition, due to the fact that every pathologic process in the living body affects it. In most cases, temperature changes are is first symptom of a disease. The Thermo-Iewy is a thermo-camera that includes dedicated software to visualize images on a PC monitor in real-time. EDP chose to implement a USB 2.0 interface in the Thermo-IEWY and selected Jungo's WinDriver USB for quick hardware access and driver development purposes.

About Thermo-Iewy Thermo-Iewy is a thermo-camera attained by an amorphous silicon microbolometer with the resolution of 160x120 pixels, spectral response of 7-14 mm (filter bandwidth), thermal resolution less than 0.08 °C, and dedicated software that allows acquiring and elaborating thermal images. The Thermo-Iewy software allows:

  • Double spatial resolution 320x240 pixels with a noise-reducing system
  • Self calibration and adaptive thermal range
  • Comfortable "case history" oriented database with extended searching functions
  • Powerful post-processing functions, including processing 3D-thermogram and geometry correction
  • Digital zoom up to x2 and reposition of the object on thermogram
  • Measuring of temperature differences
  • Changing the palettes for best visualization, palette shift operation and isotherm operation to define isothermal areas.

EDP GUI

Thermography is a non-invasive diagnostic technique that allows the examiner to visualize and quantify changes in skin surface temperature. An infrared scanning device is used to convert infrared radiation emitted from the skin surface into electrical impulses that are visualized in color on a PC monitor. This visual image graphically maps the body temperature. The spectrum of colors indicates an increase or decrease in the amount of infrared radiation being emitted from the body surface. Since there is a high degree of thermal symmetry in the normal body, subtle abnormal temperature asymmetries can be easily identified.
Infrared thermography is based on the so-called "passive" method: the diagnostic device does not interact with the object under diagnosis, but receives information from it. This safe method makes thermography free from possible limitations and contraindications thanks to the fact that it cannot harm patient's health, even on a theoretical level. High reliability of infrared diagnostics is based on stability of thermovisual symptoms over a long period; relative temperature is stable and variations are easy to understand. Taking all of the above into consideration, thermography is an objective method to control the evolution of pathological processes.

EDP GUI

Why WinDriver USB? The camera's resolution is 160x120 pixels; therefore there are 19,200 pixels to transmit to the PC for each image captured by the camera. The first project implementation achieved this by transferring the data via a serial port interface at 115 kBaud. It quickly became apparent that this technique was too slow and that a USB 2.0 interface would be more appropriate to provide real-time operation.

EDP Diagram

The company's initial intention was not to develop a driver themselves, having no previous experience of writing drivers for Windows. "For connecting our hardware to a USB port we have chosen the Cypress chip EZ-USB FX2." Said Dr. Emilio Ferraro, Engineering Division Manager at EDP. "Inside the Cypress package we have found Jungo's WinDriver driver development toolkit. We tried the free evaluation version and found it was very useful and very simple to use. For this chip, the generation of the necessary driver function calls and INF files has been a minor part of the development effort allowing us to concentrate our attention fully on other aspects of the application itself."

E.D.P. - Electronics Devices Power - S.r.l.
Via Spagna, 52
87036 - Rende (CS) - Italy
Tel: +39 0984 448305
Fax: +39 0984 447040
www.tecnapgroup.com
www.medicalthermograph.com

About WinDriver
Jungo's WinDriver™ automates and simplifies the development of user-mode device drivers and applications for USB / PCI / CardBus / ISA / PCMCIA / PMC / PCI-X / PCI-104 and CompactPCI under Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/XP Embedded/ Server 2003, Windows CE, Linux, Solaris and VxWorks. WinDriver provides a complete solution for creating high performance drivers and custom hardware access applications, thereby enabling developers to focus on their driver's added-value functionality, instead of on operating system internals and the DDK. Enhanced Built-in support is available for Actel, Altera, Atmel, CATC, Cypress, National Semiconductor, PLDA, PLX, Netchip, QuickLogic, Silicon Laboratories, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Xilinx.

About Jungo
Jungo Software Technologies is a leading supplier of driver development tools, hardware access applications, embedded USB solutions and residential gateway software. Jungo has partnered with leading operating system and silicon vendors to provide the best solutions to software and hardware developers. Jungo is a privately held company with corporate offices in San Jose, California, sales and support offices in Taipei, Texas and London and an R&D center in Israel. Founded in 1998, Jungo's investors include Conexant Systems, Infineon Ventures, Intel Communications Fund, Partech International and TeleSoft Partners.