WoundArch: A Hybrid Architecture System for the Segmentation and Classification of Chronic Wounds
Watershed, Image Processing, Chronic Wounds, Mobile Devices.
Every year, millions of people are affected by chronic wounds around the world. The wound treatment process is costly and requires nursing professionals to perform activities during patient care, including: tissue classification and wound area calculation. In this way, this work proposes to build a hybrid computational system of two configurations to support the treatment of wounds. The first configuration uses a \ textit {smartphone} to capture, segment and classify the wound images. The other configuration has a client-server architecture, the images are captured and segmented in the application and sent, through the Internet, to the web server, which is responsible for classifying the tissues of the wounds. To this end, some studies have been carried out in the literature, namely: review of scientific articles, applications similar to that proposed in this work, methods for evaluating the efficiency of computer systems and wound classification algorithms. Thus, this work uses the methods of segmentation and classification of wound images developed by Marques et al. \cite{marques2018ulcer} to build the hybrid computational system. An evaluation questionnaire was developed to be applied to nursing specialists at Hospital Universitário Onofre Lopes in order to assess the technical quality of the system. Thus, we sought to answer the following research question: are the execution times, energy expenditures and the results of segmentation and classification of wounds acceptable by nurses in both system configurations?