Preliminary attempt of infrared thermography for the screening of male myocardial ischemia

•IRT has no radiation and is suitable for disease screening.•IRT can evaluate male myocardial ischemia objectively.•The symmetry of the target area of the IRT can be quantified by this study.•The classification proposed in this paper has a higher detection rate of male MI.•IRT is not yet a standard for MI diagnosis. The threat of myocardial ischemia (MI) to human health is recognized worldwide. Most of the technologies currently used for disease screening have various disadvantages and it is difficult for them to play a role in clinical physical examination. Infrared thermography (IRT) has been a successful technology in a lot of clinical research. This study tried to establish a screening method for male MI with a high detection rate by IRT technology. A method for measuring symmetry based on low temperature sensitivity was proposed to extract the symmetry features of the IRT of the three groups of research subjects (93 persons in total) and a statistical test was performed to this method. If there was statistical significance, a mathematical model for classification would be constructed. In order to explore the value of IRT for MI screening, a double-blind comparison was made between the most common clinical method, ECG stress test (EST) and the method proposed in this study. The sensitivity, specificity and screening detection rate of the two methods to MI were calculated. After one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), it could be drawn that the measurement features of the symmetry extracted in the sample had significant statistical differences among the three groups (P