3D Imaging Analysis of Chronic Wounds Through Geometry and Temperature Measurements

Chronic wounds represent one of the most frequent pathologies affecting elderly people. In the last few years, several methods have been proposed with the aim at developing systems able to produce automatic and objective assessment of skin ulcers. Despite that, none of the existing technologies seems to be robust enough to work for all the ulcer typologies. In the majority of the clinical contexts, the evaluation of the chronic wounds still depends on the experience of the physicians rather than on the use of numerically objective attributes. This paper presents a non-invasive methodology to allow automatic measurements of chronic wounds. The proposed system involves the development of a 3D optical scanner, based on a structured light approach, combined with an infrared detector. This arrangement permits the acquisition of geometrical data including both chromatic texture and temperature information. A tool for the automatic detection of damaged skin areas has been developed by segmenting both color and thermal images, making possible to reliably quantify parameters characterizing wounds, such as area, depth and volume, even in absence of a perceptible color characterization. The described technology has been finally experienced in medical environment, proving its effectiveness for an objective assessment of wound healing.