Chronic wound assessment and infection detection method.

BACKGROUND: Numerous patients suffer from chronic wounds and wound infections nowadays. Until now, the care for wounds after surgery still remain a tedious and challenging work for the medical personnel and patients. As a result, with the help of the hand-held mobile devices, there is high demand for the development of a series of algorithms and related methods for wound infection early detection and wound self monitoring. METHODS: This research proposed an automated way to perform (1) wound image segmentation and (2) wound infection assessment after surgical operations. The first part describes an edge-based self-adaptive threshold detection image segmentation method to exclude nonwounded areas from the original images. The second part describes a wound infection assessment method based on machine learning approach. In this method, the extraction of feature points from the suture area and an optimal clustering method based on unimodal Rosin threshold algorithm that divides feature points into clusters are introduced. These clusters are then merged into several regions of interest (ROIs), each of which is regarded as a suture site. Notably, a support vector machine (SVM) can automatically interpret infections on these detected suture site. RESULTS: For (1) wound image segmentation, boundary-based evaluation were applied on 100 images with gold standard set up by three physicians. Overall, it achieves 76.44% true positive rate and 89.04% accuracy value. For (2) wound infection assessment, the results from a retrospective study using confirmed wound pictures from three physicians for the following four symptoms are presented: (1) Swelling, (2) Granulation, (3) Infection, and (4) Tissue Necrosis. Through cross-validation of 134 wound images, for anomaly detection, our classifiers achieved 87.31% accuracy value; for symptom assessment, our classifiers achieved 83.58% accuracy value. CONCLUSIONS: This augmentation mechanism has been demonstrated reliable enough to reduce the need for face-to-face diagnoses. To facilitate the use of this method and analytical framework, an automatic wound interpretation app and an accompanying website were developed. TRIAL REGISTRATION: 201505164RIND , 201803108RSB .

Virtual restoration of ancient Chinese paintings using color contrast enhancement and lacuna texture synthesis.

This work presents a novel algorithm using color contrast enhancement and lacuna texture synthesis is proposed for the virtual restoration of ancient Chinese paintings. Color contrast enhancement based on saturation and de-saturation is performed in the u'v'Y color space, to change the saturation value in the chromaticity diagram, and adaptive histogram equalization then is adopted to adjust the luminance component. Additionally, this work presents a new patching method using the Markov Random Field (MRF) model of texture synthesis. Eliminating undesirable aged painting patterns, such as stains, crevices, and artifacts, and then filling the lacuna regions with the appropriate textures is simple and efficient. The synthesization procedure integrates three key approaches, weighted mask, annular scan and auxiliary, with neighborhood searching. These approaches can maintain a complete shape and prevent edge disconnection in the final results. Moreover, the boundary between original and synthesized paintings is seamless, and unable to distinguish in which the undesirable pattern appears.