Beyond Labels: Zero-Shot Diabetic Foot Ulcer Wound Segmentation with Self-attention Diffusion Models and the Potential for Text-Guided Customization
It addresses the need for precise and efficient wound assessment in healthcare, offering a scalable AI solution for medical imaging, though it is incremental as it builds on diffusion models.
This study tackled the problem of diabetic foot ulcer wound segmentation without labeled training data by introducing ADZUS, a text-guided diffusion model, which achieved an IoU of 86.68% and precision of 94.69% on a chronic wound dataset, outperforming supervised methods.
Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) pose a significant challenge in healthcare, requiring precise and efficient wound assessment to enhance patient outcomes. This study introduces the Attention Diffusion Zero-shot Unsupervised System (ADZUS), a novel text-guided diffusion model that performs wound segmentation without relying on labeled training data. Unlike conventional deep learning models, which require extensive annotation, ADZUS leverages zero-shot learning to dynamically adapt segmentation based on descriptive prompts, offering enhanced flexibility and adaptability in clinical applications. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ADZUS surpasses traditional and state-of-the-art segmentation models, achieving an IoU of 86.68\% and the highest precision of 94.69\% on the chronic wound dataset, outperforming supervised approaches such as FUSegNet. Further validation on a custom-curated DFU dataset reinforces its robustness, with ADZUS achieving a median DSC of 75\%, significantly surpassing FUSegNet's 45\%. The model's text-guided segmentation capability enables real-time customization of segmentation outputs, allowing targeted analysis of wound characteristics based on clinical descriptions. Despite its competitive performance, the computational cost of diffusion-based inference and the need for potential fine-tuning remain areas for future improvement. ADZUS represents a transformative step in wound segmentation, providing a scalable, efficient, and adaptable AI-driven solution for medical imaging.