Detecting and measuring surface area of skin lesions

Abstract

The treatment of skin lesions of various kinds is a common task in clinical routine. Apart from wound care, the assessment of treatment efficacy plays an important role. Fully manual measurements and documentation of the healing process can be very cumbersome and imprecise. Existing technical solutions often require the user to delineate the lesion manually and rarely provide information on measurement precision or accuracy. We propose a method for segmenting and measuring lesions using a single image. Surface area of lesions on bent surfaces is estimated based on a paper ruler. Only roughly outlining the region of interest is required. Wound segmention evaluation was performed on 10 images, resulting in an accuracy of 0.98 ± 0.02. For surface measuring evaluation on 40 phantom images we found an absolute error of 0.32 ± 0.27 cm2 and a relative error of 5.2 ± 4.3%.