Eykona Technologies
The Eykona wound measurement system: modernising wound measurement for the 21st Century
Authors: Frank Bowling, Laurie King, Ronald Daniel, Hassan Fadavi, James Paterson, David Matthews, and Andrew Boulton
Presented at the 12th Malvern Diabetic Foot Conference, Malvern, UK on the 15th May 2008
Download the slides from the oral presentation
Abstract
We present initial clinical results from a new wound imaging system based on optical measurement. The system developed by Eykona Technologies has potentially unrivalled simplicity and speed of use in standard clinical settings. It provides a calibrated-colour three-dimensional model of the wound and the surrounding area. This allows quantitative 2D and 3D measurements, including depth, to be extracted by the physician in an interactive manner. The data can form part of the patients long-term electronic care record.
Testing has focused predominantly on a range of diabetic foot ulcers presented in two leading UK clinics. A total of 35 foot ulcers from 31 patients were imaged across a time period of 10 weeks, the majority of which were imaged at two or more points in time. A wide range of patient racial background and ulcer condition, location and severity was observed. Very limited supervision and instruction was given by Eykona throughout the imaging and measurement process.
Accuracy of Digital Measurement (DM) under clinician control against traditional hand-measured Elliptical Measurement (EM) was determined by observing an average maximum linear error of 28.4% between DM and EM across a total of 67 wound encounters. Preliminary work in determining absolute accuracy of DM was carried out by imaging a fabricated wound of known size from several viewpoints. Variation from the standard known-sizes wound measured by a clinician DM of wound area was estimated at 5.4%. Intra-observer variation using the new technique of linear DM by clinicians indicates a maximum variation of 0.66mm from the mean.
Early clinician feedback and empirical results from these tests suggest the system has great potential application in wound care, and is particularly appropriate for telemedicine and remote diagnosis.