Monitoring chronic wounds and determining treatment

By measuring the physical dimensions of wounds, clinicians receive feedback about the success of a selected treatment approach. This chapter reviews existing wound measurement techniques and highlights underlying principles and difficulties. As an example the performance of a new hand-held, non-contact, wound measurement device is analysed. The colour of a wound provides important clues about its status to the clinician. It can be used to assess the distribution of tissue types and potentially detect the onset of infection at an early stage. The underlying fundamentals of colour measurements by digital cameras are outlined and an example classification system is presented.