Background: In this paper a method is proposed to evaluate the heart's coronary vessels' status based on the elimination of large coronary branches from IR-thermal image. This method makes it possible to determine nutrient cardiac blood circulation by calculation of the rate of heat spreading in small coronary vessels in the myocardium at hypothermia and hyperthermia under the conditions of artificial blood circulation.
Objective: The objective of the paper includes a theoretical substantiation of the proposed method for evaluation of the heart's coronary vessels' status and an experimental investigation of the efficiency of the method.
Methods: In the experiment, the dynamics of temperature distribution in the myocardium were registered by using thermal imaging cameras Flir i7 and Thermo Cam E300.
Results: Processing of the myocardium's thermographic images and the results of heat spreading modeling make it possible to single out the temperature profiles of the visible myocardium zones and to establish the presence of coronary arteries in them.
Conclusions: The method makes it possible to monitor the heart temperature at hypothermia and hyperthermia; additionally, it makes it possible to evaluate the efficiency of the coronary artery bypass graft surgery performed during open heart operation.
Keywords: Coronary vessels; IR-thermal imaging method.