CAD Tool for Burn Diagnosis

Abstract

In this paper a new system for burn diagnosis is proposed. The aim of the system is to separate burn wounds from healthy skin, and the different types of burns (burn depths) from each other, identifying each one. The system is based on the colour and texture information, as these are the characteristics observed by physicians in order to give a diagnosis. We use a perceptually uniform colour space (L*u*v*), since Euclidean distances calculated in this space correspond to perceptually colour differences. After the burn is segmented, some colour and texture descriptors are calculated and they are the inputs to a Fuzzy-ARTMAP neural network. The neural network classifies them into three types of burns: superficial dermal, deep dermal and full thickness. Clinical effectiveness of the method was demonstrated on 62 clinical burn wound images obtained from digital colour photographs, yielding an average classification success rate of 82 % compared to expert classified images.