SBIR-STTR Award

Every year, approximately 6 million Americans suffer from chronic wounds. A significant portion of wound patients with non-healing wounds are victims of diabetes. Non-healing wounds can persist for years, causing pain to patients and placing them at risk for secondary infections and loss of limb. Wound healing is a lengthy yet not well understood process. Careful monitoring the healing progress could help doctors to assess the efficacy of treatment procedure and determine right treatment early-on. However, there is no wound measurement tool available to facilitate quantitative, accurate, easy-to- use measurement of wound healing. The primary objective of this SBIR program is to develop a novel handheld 3D camera to perform objective, quantitative, and true 3D measurements of wounds (size, shape, volume, color, and healing status). Accurate measurement of wound healing will enable doctors to assess, improve, and individualize the treatment given to each wound patient. The major innovations of this proposed project include techniques to enable the miniaturization of 3D camera hardware, and sophisticated 3D image processing and measurement software. In the Phase I project, we propose to design and prototype handheld 3D camera hardware, and to develop several critical components of 3D wound measurement algorithms, such as automatic 3D image alignment and merge, reliable wound boundary segmentation, and quantitative wound comparison. We will work closely with our collaborators at Johns Hopkins Wound Center to collect feedback to our hardware/software design and perform preliminary tests in clinical wound treatment environment to validate our designs.

Thesaurus Terms:
biomedical equipment development, patient monitoring device, photography, three dimensional imaging /topography, wound healing image processing, miniature biomedical equipment bioimaging /biomedical imaging, clinical research, human subject, patient oriented research

We propose this Phase II SBIR program to further capitalize on the very promising results from our Phase I effort to develop a novel, handheld three-dimensional (3D) camera able to perform objective, quantitative, and true 3D measurements of the size, shape, volume, color, and healing status of wounds. Accurate measurement of wound healing enables clinicians to assess, document, improve, and individualize the treatment plan given to each wound patient. In current wound care practices, clinicians often visually inspect the wound to evaluate the healing status. This is not an optimal practice because human vision lacks precision and consistency, and quantifying slow or subtle changes is very difficult. As a result, an instrument that quantifies both skin color and geometric shape variations would be particularly useful in helping clinicians assess healing status and judge the effect of hyperemia, hematoma, local inflammation, secondary infection, and tissue necrosis. Our handheld 3D camera developed under this SBIR program will prove itself to have several unique advantages over traditional methods for monitoring wound care, to include: Non-contact measurement: No risk of contaminating the wound site or disturbing the recovering tissue. Fast and easy to use: Acquires a single image in a fraction of a second and automatically merges multiple 3D images into a complete 3D model of the wound in real time; suitable for both hospital and homecare/telemedicine applications. High Accuracy: Sub-millimeter accuracy with optimal depth of field to ensure that changes suggestive of healing are captured precisely and with minimal artifact. Quantitative measurements: Both 2D color and 3D shape provide quantitative digital measurements of wound parameters such as area size, volume, length, depth, surface roughness, and its profile. Handheld device: Not only is it a handy portable instrument, it also provides a unique ability to measure wounds that extend around limbs and that are not fully visible from a single position. Reasonable cost for mass commercial market: The proposed handheld 3D camera design leads to inexpensive production. Our targeted price for such a system in mass production is under $1,000. The proposed handheld 3D camera product, if successful, is expected to have tremendous market potential in clinical, homecare, and telemedicine applications.

Public Health Relevance:
This Public Health Relevance is not available.

Thesaurus Terms:
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