METHODS OF MEASURING WOUND SIZE - A COMPARATIVE-STUDY

The lack of an accepted method of accurate and objective measurement o f wound dimensions is a major obstacle to the assessment of effective wound management regimes. This study compares three different wound vo lume measurement techniques (filling the lesion with saline, molding o f a dental impression material and a computer vision method based on i mage processing and the Structured Light technique) in terms of accura cy, precision and practicability in a clinical environment. Three grou ps of hospital staff, doctors, nurses and technicians, repeatedly meas ured a set of 6 different models of wounds. Measuring wound volume by filling it with saline produces results with standard deviations betwe en 9% and 18% of the actual volume. Dental impression material perform s better, between 5% and 16%, but is difficult to apply and time consu ming to use. Apart from the advantage of providing instant optical rec ords of wounds, the image processing method produces more reliable vol ume measurements with a standard deviation of between 3% and 15%. The results demonstrate that the computer based method yields the most rep roducible results with a minimum of inter-observer error but the metho d is not applicable for undermined, very deep and very large wounds.