TinyMSI: A cost-effective handheld device for non-contact diabetic wound monitoring

Abstract

Devices characterizing diabetic foot ulcers and other wounds currently fall into two categories. Expensive clinically-oriented devices that use mature technologies such as X-ray CT and hyperspectral imaging or low-cost solutions that leverage deep learning to infer wound characterization from conventional smartphone camera images or simple surrogate markers. Mature medical-grade devices are too expensive for primary care and assisted living facilities. Low-cost solutions rely too much on indirect statistical inference to be clinically suitable. Therefore, we propose a device that leverages mature, clinically suitable optical technologies to provide a solution for these facilities. Recognizing that individual combinations of 1–2 bands of active illumination are used individually to capture pulsation, vascular, and oxygenation images. We combine all these bands into a single multispectral lighting source to create a multi-functional, reliable device for wound assessment. We selected these bands to leverage CMOS cameras near orthogonality between the RGB channels and leverage that CMOS cameras can also sense near IR light if a filter is not present, reducing overall system complexity and needed bands. For each function, the necessary lights are turned on, and the captured raw video is then fed to the corresponding sequence of image processing steps. No deep learning models are used, so large training datasets are not required. Our device is also small, lightweight, and handheld.