Use of an Infrared Thermometer to Grade the Severity of Oral Mucositis in Patients Undergoing Antineoplastic Chemotherapy

Several grading systems for oral mucositis are available including those of the World Health Organization (WHO), Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), Western Consortium for Cancer Nursing Research WCCNR, and the National Cancer Institute Common Toxicity Criteria (NCICTC) and others However, all of these oral mucositis grading systems rely on visual examination and are therefore subjective and operator-dependent tools and suffer from significant interpersonal variability (6). With the current improvements in medicine and technology, there is definitely a need for a more objective, easy to perform, non-invasive, affordable, quantitative and reproducible tool that is operator-independent to assess the severity of oral mucositis. The introduction of such a tool would greatly improve our ability to compare the oral mucosal toxicity of antineoplastic therapies and the efficacy of various mucoprotective therapies. Furthermore, the use of such a tool can be extended to patients undergoing radiation treatment with or without chemotherapy for various malignancies including head and neck cancers.