Unified wound diagnostic framework for wound segmentation and classification

Abstract

Chronic wounds affect millions worldwide, posing significant challenges for healthcare systems and a heavy economic burden globally. The segmentation and classification (S&C) of chronic wounds are critical for wound care management and diagnosis, aiding clinicians in selecting appropriate treatments. Existing approaches have utilized either traditional machine learning or deep learning methods for S&C. However, most focus on binary classification, with few addressing multi-class classification, often showing degraded performance for pressure and diabetic wounds. Wound segmentation has been largely limited to foot ulcer images, and there is no unified diagnostic tool for both S&C tasks. To address these gaps, we developed a unified approach that performs S&C simultaneously. For segmentation, we proposed Attention-Dense-UNet (Att-d-UNet), and for classification, we introduced a feature concatenation-based method. Our framework segments wound images using Att-d-UNet, followed by classification into one of the wound types using our proposed method. We evaluated our models on publicly available wound classification datasets (AZH and Medetec) and segmentation datasets (FUSeg and AZH). To test our unified approach, we extended wound classification datasets by generating segmentation masks for Medetec and AZH images. The proposed unified approach achieved 90% accuracy and an 86.55% dice score on the Medetec dataset and 81% accuracy and an 86.53% dice score on the AZH dataset These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our separate models and unified approach for wound S&C.