Surgical Wounds Assessment System for Self-Care

Abstract

The importance of effective surgical wound care cannot never be underestimated. Poorly managing surgical wounds may cause many serious complications. Thus, it raises the necessity to develop a patient-friendly self-care system which can help both patients and medical professionals to ensure the state of the surgical wounds without any special medical equipment. In this paper, a surgical wound assessment system for self-care is proposed. The proposed system is designed to enable patients capture surgical wound images of themselves by using a mobile device and upload these images for analysis. Combining image-processing and machine-learning techniques, the proposed method is composed of four phases. First, images are segmented into superpixels where each superpixel contains the pixels in the similar color distribution. Second, these superpixels corresponding to the skin are identified and the area of connected skin superpixels is derived. Third, surgical wounds will be extracted from this area based on the observation of the texture difference between skin and wounds. Lastly, state and symptoms of surgical wound will be assessed. Extensive experimental results are conducted. With the proposed method, more than 90% state assessment results are correct and more than 91% symptom assessment results consistent with the actual diagnosis. Moreover, case studies are provided to show the advantage and limitation of this system. These results show that this system could perform well in the practical self-care scenario.Index Terms-Artificial intelligence (AI), classification, health care service systems.

Use of technology for self-care in surgical wound infection surveillance: integrative review

“…The primary studies were published between the years 2011 and 2019, with the majority being in the English language (8/9), all published in international journals. Of the total, six are characterized as being of cross-sectional design (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23) , two randomized clinical trials (9,24) and a case report (25) .…”

“…This study allowed us to synthesize information about the use of technology for self-care in surgical site infection surveillance. Thus, it was identified the use of mobile devices with access to camera, voice recorder, text messages, memory capacity, (20) Taiwan Propose a surgical wound assessment system for self-care.…”

“…In addition, a study with breast cancer patients showed that, like the study by Chen et al (20) , who proposed a surgical wound assessment system using a superpixel (high-resolution) image capture tool, the implementation of technologies has allowed an assessment as reliable as the face-to-face evaluation. This indicates that involving health care professionals in remote monitoring through applications may be a cheaper and more effective alternative for improving health outcomes management (28) .…”

Experimental Study on Wound Area Measurement with Mobile Devices

“…The methods presented by the authors of [29,30,36,38] need high processing power and cannot be implemented in mobile devices. They provide only theoretical studies that do not provide contact between patients and healthcare professionals.…”

“…To measure a surgical wound's size, the authors of [36] used the HSV color model to implement normalization techniques and the SEED algorithm for superpixel segmentation.…”