Wound Tissue Segmentation and Classification Using U-Net and Random Forest

Abstract

Analysing wound tissue is a crucial research field for assessing the progression of wound healing. Wounds exhibit certain attributes concerning colour and texture, although these features can vary among different wound images. Research in this field serves multiple purposes, including confirming the presence of chronic wounds, identifying infected wounds, determining the origin of the wound and addressing other factors that classify and characterise various types of wounds. Wounds pose a substantial health concern. Currently, clinicians and nurses mainly evaluate the healing status of wounds based on visual examination. This paper presents an outline of digital image processing and traditional machine learning methods for the tissue analysis of chronic wound images. Here, we propose a novel wound tissue analysis system that consists of wound image pre-processing, wound area segmentation and wound analysis by tissue segmentation. The wound area is extracted using a simple U-Net segmentation model. Granulation, slough and necrotic tissues are the three primary forms of wound tissues. The [Formula: see text]-means clustering technique is employed to assign labels to tissues. Within the wound boundary, the tissue classification is performed by applying the Random Forest classification algorithm. Both segmentation (U-Net) and classification (Random Forest) models are trained, and the segmentation gives 99% accuracy, and the classification model gives 99.21% accuracy.