A photometric stereo approach for chronic wound measurement

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to review state of the art of techniques for dimensioning chronic wounds, and validate the possibilities of employing a new proposed optical imaging approach for general task of wound assessment. Design/methodology/approach – Current techniques used for quantifying wound surface are reviewed and evaluated from various perspectives to exam their usability in wound care clinical settings. A photometric stereo (PS) approach will be identified and verified to work as an alternative solution to better satisfy practical requirements on quantifying the dimension of real and mocked wounds. Findings – Both contact and contactless approaches provide some useful functions for wound management; however, new imaging modalities are still required for achieving good portability, affordability and applicability in assisting decision-making in clinical settings. The PS approach can work as a potential solution to provide these functionalities as well as dense geometrical and color texture information of measured areas. The experiments demonstrate that the new approach is able to conveniently produce comparable results to those from latest stereo vision-based techniques. Research limitations/implications – This work proposed and initially verified the potential of PS technique for the task of wound measurement. Substantial improvements on the prototype and more clinical trials are still required to validate the new technique before it is accepted as a tool for practical wound measurement. Originality/value – This new PS approach has good potential to reliably measure the dimension of wounds as well as recover their color texture which could contain additional valuable information for predicting a healing procedure for those wound occurring deeper underneath the skin surface.