Scientific Comparison of Burn Injuries Based on Objective Assessment

Introduction: In recent years a complete and accurate documentation of injuries, treatment and convalescence has become essential for many reasons such as improvement of treatment, legal requirements and many more. Publications state that surface estimations concerning the same injuries have significant variations. In order to tackle this drawback, the overall aim of our long term research project is to facilitate complete and objective burn assessment and documentation. Methods: In order to avoid subjective estimations within the burn assessment process, we have developed a software system which uses an individually adapted three-dimensional model as a basis. Furthermore, this model is used to define areas of burns, surgical procedures or care services; consequently the surface of those regions can be calculated. By integrating the processing of false-color pictures generated by burn depth determination systems, burns can be automatically transferred to the 3D model. Our system superimposes the digital image and aligns the model and the patient on the picture. A special algorithm automatically projects all false-colored areas onto the model surface. Results: Our research group provides a system for assessing and documenting burn injuries completely and objectively. Besides the objective burn assessment relevant medical encodings and various reports can be generated; furthermore, it offers an interface to the American NTRACS system. The developed system is constantly used, evaluated and improved by a growing number of burn centers across the world. Conclusions: By implementing (semi-) automatic documentation capabilities it is possible to generate reproducible diagnoses for burn injuries and therefore improve the documentation quality. The complete documentation is available electronically, which enables that acquired data can easily be queried and used to support physicians in their scientific work. Subsequently, the documentation workload can be reduced and the quality of burn assessment can be improved. Applicability of Research to Practice: The described system is the result of research work done in the past ten years in cooperation with numerous medical partners. The combination with burn depth determination systems reduces workload and at the same time improves quality of documentation, enabling an objective comparison between burn cases, treatments and outcomes. External Funding: The project is funded by the Upper Austrian Government and the Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft (FFG).