On-site burn severity assessment using smartphone-captured color burn wound images.

Abstract

Accurate assessment of burn severity is crucial for the management of burn injuries. Currently, clinicians mainly rely on visual inspection to assess burns, characterized by notable inter-observer discrepancies. In this study, we introduce an innovative analysis platform using color burn wound images for automatic burn severity assessment. To do this, we propose a novel joint-task deep learning model, which is capable of simultaneously segmenting both burn regions and body parts, the two crucial components in calculating the percentage of total body surface area (%TBSA). Asymmetric attention mechanism is introduced, allowing attention guidance from the body part segmentation task to the burn region segmentation task. A user-friendly mobile application is developed to facilitate a fast assessment of burn severity at clinical settings. The proposed framework was evaluated on a dataset comprising 1340 color burn wound images captured on-site at clinical settings. The average Dice coefficients for burn depth segmentation and body part segmentation are 85.12 % and 85.36 %, respectively. The R² for %TBSA assessment is 0.9136. The source codes for the joint-task framework and the application are released on Github (https://github.com/xjtu-mia/BurnAnalysis). The proposed platform holds the potential to be widely used at clinical settings to facilitate a fast and precise burn assessment.