edited by: D. Balageas, G. Busse, G.M. Carlomagno, and B. Wiecek

The Eurotherm Committee was created in 1986 by members of the European Community to promote the European co-operation in Thermal Sciences by gathering thermal scientists and engineers working in specialised areas. The series of Eurotherm Seminars established by the Committee has become a popular forum for scientific and technical exchange of ideas on a wide range of special topics.

The continuous evolution of techniques, devices, and fields of applications is a permanent challenge for researches and engineers working in the domain Quantitative InfraRed Thermography (QIRT). To make this development more effective, the QIRT Conference was established in the frame of the Eurotherm Seminars both to focus on recent achievements as well as to provide an opportunity for strong interchange between all specialists and potential users from various fields of applications. The first QIRT Conference was held in Chatenay-Malabry, in the Ecole Centrale de Paris in 1992 and chaired by Daniel Balageas.

During the course of the conference, the QIRT Working Group^(*) was established both for organisation of QIRT European Conference every two years, as well as for permanent information and co-ordination in the field of infrared thermography. The next conferences, QIRT’94 and QIRT’96, were chaired by Giovanni Carlomagno and Gerd Busse, and held in Sorento (Italy) and Stuttgart (Germany). Every time the conference was preceded by three Pre-Seminar Courses on basic thermography, applications to solids, and applications to fluids.

The present conference QIRT’98 (Eurotherm Seminar No. 60) for the first time has been organised in Central Europe, in Poland, by the Institute of Electronics at the Technical University of Lódz. It was chaired by Daniel Balageas from ONERA France, and organised by Boguslaw Wiecek from TU Lódz.

A growing interest is now observed for medical applications of thermography, first of all because the thermography is a non-invasive way of diagnosis in medicine. The community of medical specialists using thermography and other infrared techniques is now significantly enlarging. In this context, and with the aim of enhancing the quantitative character of infrared thermography in all fields of application, and in particular in the medical one, the QIRT Working Group encouraged the participation of medical researchers in this conference.

During the present seminar, the session of medical applications was the largest during QIRT history, with 14 contributions, most of them presented by invited speakers. Although some papers of this session are not really dealing with quantitative aspects of the thermographic technique, the Working Group decided to publish the full collection of these papers and, to give more emphasis to this event, to publish them in a separate volume under the name of Medical Infrared Thermography – MIRT. The working Group wishes that the medical contributions to the next QIRT Conference will be enlarged and possibly more quantitative, since this character is the driving force and the raison d’être of the QIRT Conferences.

The editors are grateful to the QIRT-WG members, especially to Scientific Committee, to all colleagues who presented the invited lectures, the oral presentations and posters, to these who chaired the conference sessions, and last but not least to the local group from the Institute of Electronics for perfect organisation and unlimited support. The organiser wishes to express many thanks to the sponsors of QIRT’98, and it is a great pleasure to acknowledge the helpful support provided by:

• the Polish State Committee for Scientific Research,
• the President of the City of Lódz,
• the Rector of Technical University of Lódz,
• the Dean of Electrotechnics and Electronics Faculty,
• Inframetrics Inc.

The conference organisers encouraged companies to display their recent product in the exhibition. The fees from the exhibition made the attendance of many Central and East European participants possible. It is a pleasure to acknowledge these companies for their indirect support which helped the organisers to bring together scientists and engineers working in quantitative infrared thermography.

D. Balageas, G. Busse, G.M. Carlomagno, and B. Wiecek