Computer-aided burn assessment

In recent years a complete and accurate documentation of injuries, treatment and convalescence has become essential for many reasons such as improvement of treatment or legal requirements. Currently, the burned surface area is estimated and the burn depth is determined by visual observation based on personal experience. However, publications state that surface estimations concerning the same injuries have significant variations. In order to tackle this drawback, our long term research project aims to facilitate complete and objective burn assessment and documentation. In order to avoid subjective estimations, we have developed a system, which uses an individually adapted threedimensional model 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, the 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. Our algorithm automatically projects all false-colored areas onto the model surface. We present a system for assessing and documenting burn injuries completely and objectively. It exploits the capabilities of modern computer hardware to improve patient treatment, documentation and research possibilities. Besides the objective burn assessment relevant medical encodings and various reports can be generated; furthermore, it offers an interface to the American NTRACS system. Our system is able 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. The described system is the result of research work done in the past ten years in cooperation with numerous medical partners.