WoundAmbit: Bridging State-of-the-Art Semantic Segmentation and Real-World Wound Care

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Main Authors: Borst, Vanessa, Dittus, Timo, Dege, Tassilo, Schmieder, Astrid, Kounev, Samuel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Borst, Vanessa
Dittus, Timo
Dege, Tassilo
Schmieder, Astrid
Kounev, Samuel
author_facet Borst, Vanessa
Dittus, Timo
Dege, Tassilo
Schmieder, Astrid
Kounev, Samuel
contents Chronic wounds affect a large population, particularly the elderly and diabetic patients, who often exhibit limited mobility and co-existing health conditions. Automated wound monitoring via mobile image capture can reduce in-person physician visits by enabling remote tracking of wound size. Semantic segmentation is key to this process, yet wound segmentation remains underrepresented in medical imaging research. To address this, we benchmark state-of-the-art deep learning models from general-purpose vision, medical imaging, and top methods from public wound challenges. For a fair comparison, we standardize training, data augmentation, and evaluation, conducting cross-validation to minimize partitioning bias. We also assess real-world deployment aspects, including generalization to an out-of-distribution wound dataset, computational efficiency, and interpretability. Additionally, we propose a reference object-based approach to convert AI-generated masks into clinically relevant wound size estimates and evaluate this, along with mask quality, for the five best architectures based on physician assessments. Overall, the transformer-based TransNeXt showed the highest levels of generalizability. Despite variations in inference times, all models processed at least one image per second on the CPU, which is deemed adequate for the intended application. Interpretability analysis typically revealed prominent activations in wound regions, emphasizing focus on clinically relevant features. Expert evaluation showed high mask approval for all analyzed models, with VWFormer and ConvNeXtS backbone performing the best. Size retrieval accuracy was similar across models, and predictions closely matched expert annotations. Finally, we demonstrate how our AI-driven wound size estimation framework, WoundAmbit, is integrated into a custom telehealth system.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06185
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WoundAmbit: Bridging State-of-the-Art Semantic Segmentation and Real-World Wound Care
Borst, Vanessa
Dittus, Timo
Dege, Tassilo
Schmieder, Astrid
Kounev, Samuel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Chronic wounds affect a large population, particularly the elderly and diabetic patients, who often exhibit limited mobility and co-existing health conditions. Automated wound monitoring via mobile image capture can reduce in-person physician visits by enabling remote tracking of wound size. Semantic segmentation is key to this process, yet wound segmentation remains underrepresented in medical imaging research. To address this, we benchmark state-of-the-art deep learning models from general-purpose vision, medical imaging, and top methods from public wound challenges. For a fair comparison, we standardize training, data augmentation, and evaluation, conducting cross-validation to minimize partitioning bias. We also assess real-world deployment aspects, including generalization to an out-of-distribution wound dataset, computational efficiency, and interpretability. Additionally, we propose a reference object-based approach to convert AI-generated masks into clinically relevant wound size estimates and evaluate this, along with mask quality, for the five best architectures based on physician assessments. Overall, the transformer-based TransNeXt showed the highest levels of generalizability. Despite variations in inference times, all models processed at least one image per second on the CPU, which is deemed adequate for the intended application. Interpretability analysis typically revealed prominent activations in wound regions, emphasizing focus on clinically relevant features. Expert evaluation showed high mask approval for all analyzed models, with VWFormer and ConvNeXtS backbone performing the best. Size retrieval accuracy was similar across models, and predictions closely matched expert annotations. Finally, we demonstrate how our AI-driven wound size estimation framework, WoundAmbit, is integrated into a custom telehealth system.
title WoundAmbit: Bridging State-of-the-Art Semantic Segmentation and Real-World Wound Care
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06185