Computer-aided diagnosis for burnt skin images using deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

Numerous patients died every year due to the leading causes of deaths all over the world and burn injuries are one of them. Burn injury cases are most viewed in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Researchers show great interest to classify the burn into different depths through digital means. In Pakistan, at provisional level, it’s really a significant issue to categorize the burn and its depths due to the non-availability of expert doctors and surgeons; hence the decision for the correct first treatment can't be made, so this may cause a serious issue later on. The main objectives of this research work are to segment the burn wounds and classification of burn depths into 1st, 2nd and 3rd degrees respectively. A real-time dataset of burnt patients has been collected from the burn unit of Allied Hospital Faisalabad, Pakistan. The dataset used for this research task contains 450 images of all the three levels of burn depths. Segmentation of the burnt area was done by the use of Otsu's method of thresholding and feature vector was obtained through the use of statistical methods. We have used the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to estimate the burn depths. The network was trained by 65 percent of the images and the remaining 35 percent images were used for testing the accuracy of the classifier. The maximum average accuracy obtained by using the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) classifier is reported round about 79.4% and these results are the best if we compare them with previous results. From the obtained results of this research work, non-expert doctors will be able to apply the correct first treatment for the quality evaluation of burn depths.