Through the early screening of diseases, the development of targeted treatment programs of precision medicine has been essential to medical development. Medical imaging detection is an important foundation for precision medicine. There is no obvious characterization in the early stage of the disease, thus, the conventional detection method has certain limitations, but the body will show abnormal temperature distribution, and infrared thermography can detect the change of temperature sensitively. So, its application in early disease detection has attracted significant attention. In this study, the advantages and disadvantages of X-ray examination, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, and other medical imaging detection methods, especially the mechanism of infrared thermography applied to disease detection, are introduced. Then, it systematically expounds on the domestic and foreign current situation of infrared thermography and advanced image recognition technology in early disease detection and recognition. It analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of infrared thermography in early disease detection, with the advantages of lossless, fast, and high accuracy and disadvantages such as the need for a large amount of data and poor performance of image processing algorithm. It suggested that the combination of infrared thermography and deep learning will be the main research direction in the future.