An active contour model for measuring the area of leg ulcers

Leg ulcers are chronic skin wounds that affect many people and take a long time to heal. The progress of wound healing and the effect of clinical treatments can be monitored partly by measuring the area of the wound. Measurements taken via manually based methods, such as using a computer pointing device to delineate the wound boundary in a digitized image, suffer from variations due to manual dexterity and differences of opinion between observers. An active contour model is presented that models the contour using piecewise B-spline arcs and uses the minimax principle to adaptively regularize the contour according to the local conditions in the wound image. The model makes use of the existing manual delineation process in order to initialize the solution and is shown to reduce the effect of the inherent variations upon the repeatability and consistency of area measurements in many cases.