Shalini Prasad, Prashant Ankur Jain and Satendra Singh
The proposed work is to study a standardized and objective technique to assess the progress of wound healing in foot by means of texture analysis. The methods of image pre-processing, segmentation and texture analysis together with visual expert’s evaluation were used to assess the wound healing process. The images were intensity normalized, and wounds were automatic segmented using a snake’s segmentation system. We found texture characteristics that may indicate the progression of wound healing process. More specifically, some texture features increase (mean, contrast), while some other texture features decrease (entropy, sum of squares variance, sum average, sum variance) with the progression of the wound healing process. Some of these features were found to be significantly different in a specific time point and this could be used to indicate the rate of wound healing. No significant differences were found for all geometrical measures. The results of this study suggest that some texture features might be used to monitor the wound healing process, thus reducing the workload of experts, provide standardization, reduce costs, and improve the quality for patients. The simplicity of the method also suggests that it may be a valuable tool in clinical wound evaluation
