Monitoring Wound Healing With Contactless Measurements and Augmented Reality.

Virginia Mamone,Mauro Ferrari,Miriam Di Fonzo,Nicola Esposito,Vincenzo Ferrari

doi:10.1109/jtehm.2020.2983156

Virginia Mamone, Mauro Ferrari + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/jtehm.2020.2983156

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Abstract

Objective: This work presents a device for non-invasive wound parameters assessment, designed to overcome the drawbacks of traditional methods, which are mostly rough, inaccurate, and painful for the patient. The device estimates the morphological parameters of the wound and provides augmented reality (AR) visual feedback on the wound healing status by projecting the wound border acquired during the last examination, thus improving doctor-patient communication. Methods: An accurate 3D model of the wound is created by stereophotogrammetry and refined through self-organizing maps. The 3D model is used to estimate physical parameters for wound healing assessment and integrates AR functionalities based on a miniaturized projector. The physical parameter estimation functionalities are evaluated in terms of precision, accuracy, inter-operator variability, and repeatability, whereas AR wound border projection is evaluated in terms of accuracy on the same phantom. Results: The accuracy and precision of the device are respectively 2% and 1.2% for linear parameters, and 1.7% and 1.3% for area and volume. The AR projection shows an error distance <1 mm. No statistical difference was found between the measurements of different operators. Conclusion: The device has proven to be an objective and non-operator-dependent tool for assessing the morphological parameters of the wound. Comparison with non-contact devices shows improved accuracy, offering reliable and rigorous measurements. Clinical Impact: Chronic wounds represent a significant health problem with high recurrence rates due to the ageing of the population and diseases such as diabetes and obesity. The device presented in this work provides an easy-to-use non-invasive tool to obtain useful information for treatment.

Highlights

Chronic wounds, including vascular ulcers, pressure sores, and diabetic foot ulcers, result from a wound that, due to different pathological factors, failed to complete the physiological healing process and does not recover within three months [1]
The aim of our work is to identify guidelines for the development of versatile and complete devices capable of obtaining both wound geometric parameters and tissue classification, and augmented reality (AR) functionalities that provide an immediate feedback on the ulcer status in support of doctor-patient communication
The re-projection error is the standard method to evaluate intrinsic calibration accuracy; it corresponds to the distance between a checkerboard corner in a calibration image and the respective world point projected into the same image

Summary

Introduction

Chronic wounds, including vascular ulcers, pressure sores, and diabetic foot ulcers, result from a wound that, due to different pathological factors, failed to complete the physiological healing process and does not recover within three months [1]. These conditions represent a significant health problem; only in the U.S, about 6.5 million patients suffer from chronic wounds [2], with a great prevalence in adults over 65 years of age.

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