Automated computer-assisted surface area estimation in large surface burns: Is Fiji taking over burn care?

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Burn Management
• Computational Analysis

Background:

• Current methods for estimating large surface burns often lead to overestimation and have limitations.
• Accurate assessment of burn extent is crucial for effective patient management and treatment planning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the accuracy of Fiji software for both manual and automated computer-assisted estimation of large surface burns.
• To compare Fiji software's estimations with other common methods used in burn assessment.

Main Methods:

• A retrospective analysis of 37 patients with large surface burns was conducted.
• Fiji software was used for manual and automated total body surface area (TBSA) estimation from admission photographs.
• Results were compared against estimations from a smartphone application, referring emergency doctor, and a consultant plastic surgeon.

Main Results:

• Excellent intra-examiner agreement was observed between consultant plastic surgeon and automated Fiji estimations (0.968).
• Manual Fiji estimations also showed excellent agreement with the consultant plastic surgeon (0.958).
• Automated and manual Fiji estimations demonstrated high concordance (0.991) with a mean deviation of 0.729%.

Conclusions:

• Manual and automated Fiji software provide highly accurate TBSA estimations through pixel-by-pixel analysis.
• Automated methods achieve precision comparable to manual approaches in burn extent assessment.
• Computer-assisted image analysis, particularly with Fiji software, shows significant potential to enhance burn care practices.