Wound measurement on smart phones

Abstract

A smart phone is used to accomplish measurement of a wound surface area, when at least one flat marker device, which is a predefined reference, is placed near the wound and photographed by a smart phone.

1 . A system for measuring a wound of a patient, comprising:
 (A) a set of at least one flat marker device to be placed on the patient's unwounded skin near the wound, each flat marker device having a top surface with a predefined pattern;   (B) a computerized system in which is stored in computer-readable form the predefined pattern and/or the known size of the flat marker device having the predefined pattern, wherein the computerized system comprises an imaging device, and wherein the computerized system performs steps comprising:
 capturing an image that includes the wound and the set of at least one flat marker device nearby; 
 processing the captured image and recognizing a part of the captured image as the predefined pattern; 
 processing the captured image and recognizing a part of the captured image as the wound; 
 attributing a boundary to the recognized wound; 
 after the boundary has been attributed to the wound, computing a surface area of the wound based on the known size of the flat marker device. 
   
     
     
         2 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the set consists of exactly one flat marker device. 
     
     
         3 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the set consists of between 1 flat marker device and 6 flat marker devices. 
     
     
         4 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the flat marker devices in the set are identical. 
     
     
         5 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein each flat marker device has a top surface that consists of an interior surrounded by a contrasting exterior. 
     
     
         6 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein each flat marker device is square or rectangular in shape, and has a top surface that consists of an interior solid color surrounded by a contrasting exterior. 
     
     
         7 . The system of  claim 6 , wherein the top surface consists of a white interior solid color surrounded by a black contrasting exterior. 
     
     
         8 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the step of attributing a boundary to the wound comprises carrying out an edge-searching algorithm. 
     
     
         9 . The system of  claim 1 , further comprising a screen or a display. 
     
     
         10 . (canceled) 
     
     
         11 . (canceled) 
     
     
         12 . (canceled) 
     
     
         13 . (canceled) 
     
     
         14 . (canceled) 
     
     
         15 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the computerized system performs a computing step using a watershed algorithm. 
     
     
         16 . (canceled) 
     
     
         17 . (canceled) 
     
     
         18 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the marker on a bottom side comprises an adhesive backing. 
     
     
         19 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the marker on a bottom side includes an adhesive section that only occupies a center section of the bottom side. 
     
     
         20 . (canceled) 
     
     
         21 . (canceled) 
     
     
         22 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the automated system performs watershed processing followed by contour finding. 
     
     
         23 . A wound measurement method, comprising steps each of which is performed by an automated system of:
 initializing a camera including initialized buffers for image processing,   obtaining captured frame data and converting to Bitmap format,   converting to a gray picture and filtering out noise,   edge detection processing,   contour finding, and   finding marker objects and computing an average area of the marker objects.   
     
     
         24 . The method of  claim 23 , wherein the marker objects are square objects. 
     
     
         25 . (canceled) 
     
     
         26 . (canceled) 
     
     
         27 . The method of  claim 26 , including using an obtained touch point as a wound sample, using neighboring location of the squares as a normal skin sample, and performing Watershed edge detection. 
     
     
         28 . The method of  claim 27 , including finding contours and choosing all convex contours. 
     
     
         29 . The method of  claim 28 , including drawing a result on a scratch buffer, finding a contour that encloses all other contours, and using the found contour as a boundary of the wound. 
     
     
         30 . The method of  claim 29 , including computing an area of the wound, comparing the computed area to an average area of the squares, and obtaining an absolute wound area measurement. 
     
     
         31 . (canceled) 
     
     
         32 . (canceled) 
     
     
         33 . (canceled) 
     
     
         34 . (canceled) 
     
     
         35 . (canceled) 
     
     
         36 . A wound measurement method, comprising:
 positioning a set of at least two marker devices near a wound on a patient but not touching the wound;   taking an image including the wound and the thus positioned set of marker devices; wherein the image is taken via a camera or imaging device; and   processing the image to arrive at a computed surface area of the wound, wherein the image-processing step is performed by a smart phone or other automated device or processor.   
     
     
         37 . (canceled)