Review of machine learning for optical imaging of burn wound severity assessment

Abstract

Over the past decade, machine learning (ML) algorithms have rapidly become much more widespread for numerous biomedical applications, including the diagnosis and categorization of disease and injury.Aim: Here, we seek to characterize the recent growth of ML techniques that use imaging data to classify burn wound severity and report on the accuracies of different approaches.Approach: To this end, we present a comprehensive literature review of preclinical and clinical studies using ML techniques to classify the severity of burn wounds. Results:The majority of these reports used digital color photographs as input data to the classification algorithms, but recently there has been an increasing prevalence of the use of ML approaches using input data from more advanced optical imaging modalities (e.g., multispectral and hyperspectral imaging, optical coherence tomography), in addition to multimodal techniques. The classification accuracy of the different methods is reported; it typically ranges from ∼70% to 90% relative to the current gold standard of clinical judgment. Conclusions:The field would benefit from systematic analysis of the effects of different input data modalities, training/testing sets, and ML classifiers on the reported accuracy. Despite this current limitation, ML-based algorithms show significant promise for assisting in objectively classifying burn wound severity.

An Optical Tomography-Based Score to Assess Pediatric Hand Burns

“…This OCT burn depth score complements other widely used scores to help us as clinicians facilitate diagnosis and enable the best clinical management [22,23]. Combining imagining with Artificial Intelligence bears huge potential in the future for achieving systematic user-independent assessments [24]. Many aspects of burn wounds may be relevant for prognosis, with depth, localization and size being only very rough estimators of a complex biological process.…”