Generating 3D Bio-Printable Patches Using Wound Segmentation and Reconstruction to Treat Diabetic Foot Ulcers
This addresses the need for efficient, customized wound treatment in diabetic patients, representing a novel integration of segmentation and reconstruction for medical applications.
The paper tackles the problem of treating diabetic foot ulcers by introducing AiD Regen, a system that generates 3D bio-printable wound patches, achieving compelling accuracy in 3D model reconstruction and outperforming prior wound segmentation models.
We introduce AiD Regen, a novel system that generates 3D wound models combining 2D semantic segmentation with 3D reconstruction so that they can be printed via 3D bio-printers during the surgery to treat diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs). AiD Regen seamlessly binds the full pipeline, which includes RGB-D image capturing, semantic segmentation, boundary-guided point-cloud processing, 3D model reconstruction, and 3D printable G-code generation, into a single system that can be used out of the box. We developed a multi-stage data preprocessing method to handle small and unbalanced DFU image datasets. AiD Regen's human-in-the-loop machine learning interface enables clinicians to not only create 3D regenerative patches with just a few touch interactions but also customize and confirm wound boundaries. As evidenced by our experiments, our model outperforms prior wound segmentation models and our reconstruction algorithm is capable of generating 3D wound models with compelling accuracy. We further conducted a case study on a real DFU patient and demonstrated the effectiveness of AiD Regen in treating DFU wounds.