Application to Quantify Ulcer Areas and Track Their Progress.

Area of Science:

• Wound healing and regenerative medicine
• Medical imaging and diagnostics
• Biomedical engineering

Background:

• Chronic ulcer treatments, including diabetic foot ulcers and pressure sores, necessitate prolonged care.
• Objective indicators for assessing chronic ulcer treatment efficacy are currently limited.
• Traditional ulcer assessment relies on subjective visual examination, leading to less reproducible data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a user-friendly application for automating chronic ulcer area measurement.
• To provide a graphical time-series display of manually classified ulcer components.
• To establish a foundation for future AI-driven automated ulcer diagnosis systems.

Main Methods:

• Ulcer images were captured with a reference scale (1.5-cm diameter sticker).
• Users manually categorized and color-coded ulcer components within the application.
• The application calculated pixel areas, estimated actual component areas using the reference, and generated time-series graphs.

Main Results:

• The application successfully automated the area measurement of individual ulcer components.
• Graphical displays effectively illustrated changes in ulcer component areas over time.
• Users could visually track quality changes and the chronic ulcer healing process.

Conclusions:

• The developed application streamlines objective wound area measurement and time-course visualization.
• It enhances the ability to visually track chronic ulcer healing and component changes.
• This work paves the way for advanced, automated wound assessment systems.