Chronic Wound Tissue Classification Using Convolutional Networks and Color Space Reduction

Chronic Wounds are ulcers presenting a difficult or nearly interrupted cicatrization process that increase the risk of complications to the health of patients, like amputation and infections. This research proposes a general noninvasive methodology for the segmentation and analysis of chronic wounds images by computing the wound areas affected by necrosis. Invasive techniques are usually used for this calculation, such as manual planimetry with plastic films. We investigated algorithms to perform the segmentation of wounds as well as the use of several convolutional networks for classifying tissue as Necrotic, Granulation or Slough. We tested four architectures: U-Net, Segnet, FCN8 and FCN32, and proposed a color space reduction methodology that increased the reported accuracies, specificities, sensitivities and Dice coefficients for all 4 networks, achieving very good levels.