A Deep Multi-Modal Method for Patient Wound Healing Assessment
This work addresses wound care costs and clinician time for hospitalized patients, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods for wound assessment.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting patient hospitalization risk due to wound deterioration by proposing a deep multi-modal method that uses wound variables and images to predict healing trajectories, aiming for early detection of complications.
Hospitalization of patients is one of the major factors for high wound care costs. Most patients do not acquire a wound which needs immediate hospitalization. However, due to factors such as delay in treatment, patient's non-compliance or existing co-morbid conditions, an injury can deteriorate and ultimately lead to patient hospitalization. In this paper, we propose a deep multi-modal method to predict the patient's risk of hospitalization. Our goal is to predict the risk confidently by collectively using the wound variables and wound images of the patient. Existing works in this domain have mainly focused on healing trajectories based on distinct wound types. We developed a transfer learning-based wound assessment solution, which can predict both wound variables from wound images and their healing trajectories, which is our primary contribution. We argue that the development of a novel model can help in early detection of the complexities in the wound, which might affect the healing process and also reduce the time spent by a clinician to diagnose the wound.