Video-Rhino-Hygrometer (VRH)

Rhinomanometry includes a set of methodologies to diagnose pathological alterations of the nostrils and nasal cavities. Some anatomic variations could cause partial or subtotal obstruction of one or both nostrils, leading to insufficient nasal respiration. Rhinomanometry measures the airflow through one nostril at time, while a pad occludes the other. This method has some drawbacks, such as the alteration of airflow in the not-occluded nostril due to the presence of the pad, the low reproducibility, and a reduced patient comfort. In this paper we propose a new methodologies that, we call Video-Rhino-Hygrometer (VRH)1, and illustrate specific device to perform it. VRH may be considered as an automatized evolution of the classical Glatzel methods, because it infers information on clinical parameters analysing the image produced by the condense of the breath on a suitable surface. Specifically, VRH uses a web-cam to record these images and, after a suitable processing, it is able to compute a set of clinical features useful to perform diagnosis. Encouraging clinical tests show that the proposed approach provides results comparable with classical rhinomanometry tools without using the pad, obtaining reproducibility results, with an higher comfort for the patient and with a reduced examination time. © 2006 IEEE.