Computerised prediction of healing for venous leg ulcers

Early prediction of delayed healing for venous leg ulcers could improve management outcomes by enabling earlier initiation of adjuvant therapies. In this paper, we propose a framework for computerised prediction of healing for venous leg ulcers assessed in home settings using thermal images of the 0 week. Wound data of 56 older participants over 12 weeks were used for the study. Thermal images of the wounds were collected in their homes and labelled as healed or unhealed at the 12th week follow up. Textural information of the thermal images at week 0 was extracted. Thermal images of unhealed wounds had a higher variation of grey tones distribution. We demonstrated that the first three principal components of the textural features from one timepoint can be used as an input to a Bayesian neural network to discriminate between healed and unhealed wounds. Using the optimal Bayesian neural network, the classification results showed 78.57% sensitivity and 60.00% specificity. This non-contact method, incorporating machine learning, can provide a computerised prediction of this delay in the first assessment (week 0) in participants’ homes compared to the current method that is able to do this in 3rd week and requires contact digital planimetry.