Performance Analysis of Compression Techniques for Chronic Wound Image Transmission Under Smartphone-Enabled Tele-Wound Network

Abstract

The healing status of chronic wounds is important for monitoring the condition of the wounds. This article designs and discusses the implementation of smartphone-enabled compression technique under a tele-wound network (TWN) system. Nowadays, there is a huge demand for memory and bandwidth savings for clinical data processing. Wound images are captured using a smartphone through a metadata application page. Then, they are compressed and sent to the telemedical hub with a set partitioning in hierarchical tree (SPIHT) compression algorithm. The transmitted image can then be reduced, followed by an improvement in the segmentation accuracy and sensitivity. Better wound healing treatment depends on segmentation and classification accuracy. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of rates (bits per pixel), compression ratio, peak signal to noise ratio, transmission time, mean square error and diagnostic quality under telemedicine framework. A SPIHT compression technique assisted YDbDr-Fuzzy c-means clustering considerably reduces the execution time (105s), is simple to implement, saves memory (18 KB), improves segmentation accuracy (98.39%), and yields better results than the same without using SPIHT. The results favor the possibility of developing a practical smartphone-enabled telemedicine system and show the potential for being implemented in the field of clinical evaluation and the management of chronic wounds in the future.