Reliability of digital videometry and acetate tracing in measuring the surface area of cutaneous wounds

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the rt liability of digi tal videometry and acetate tracing in the measurement of cutaneous wound ar ea, Methods: Four clinicians used both digital videometry and acetate traci ng to measure five wounds that were artificially created on a cadaver speci men. In addition, the clinicians used an analog centimeter ruler to determi ne a rough estimate of the area of each wound. The wounds were measured a t otal of five rimes with each measurement instrument using a non-sequential repeat measures design. Associations between the three wound measurement te chniques were examined with Pearson correlation coefficients. In addition: intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were calculated for each pair of the three measurement techniques, Results: Correlation between the measurem ent systems for all raters combined yielded Pearson r-values of 0.93 for ru ler and acetate, 0.95 for ruler and digital and 0.97 for acetate and digita l. Furthermore, the average measure ICC between acetate and digital was 0.9 3, between acetate and ruler was 0.76 and between digital and ruler was 0.5 7. Conclusion: These results suggest that wound area measurements obtained using digital videometry and acetate tracing are very similar and both tech niques can be used interchangeably ill either clinical or research settings . (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.