Wound Detection by Simple Feedforward Neural Network

Abstract

Chronic wounds are a heavy burden on medical facilities, so any help in treating them is most welcome. Current research focuses on wound analysis, especially wound tissue classification, wound measurement, and wound healing prediction to assist medical personnel in wound treatment, with the main goal of reducing wound healing time. The first phase of wound analysis is wound segmentation, where the task is to extract wounds from the healthy tissue and image background. In this work, a standard feedforward neural network was developed for the purpose of wound segmentation using data from the MICCAI 2021 Foot Ulcer Segmentation (FUSeg) Challenge. It proved to be a simple yet efficient method for extracting wounds from images. The proposed algorithm is part of a compact system that analyzes chronic wounds using a robotic manipulator, RGB-D camera and 3D scanner. The feedforward neural network consists of only five fully connected layers, the first four with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation functions and the last with sigmoid activation functions. Three separate models were trained and tested using images provided as part of the challenge. The predicted images were post-processed and merged to improve the final segmentation performance.The accuracy metrics observed during model training and selection were Precision, Recall and F1 score. The experimental results of the proposed network provided a recall value of 0.77, precision value of 0.72, and an F1 score (Dice score) of 0.74.