Automatic measurement of pressure ulcers using Support Vector Machines and GrabCut.

Background And Objective: Pressure ulcers are regions of trauma caused by a continuous pressure applied to soft tissues between a bony prominence and a hard surface. The manual monitoring of their healing evolution can be achieved by area assessment techniques that include the use of rulers and adhesive labels in direct contact with the injury, being highly inaccurate and subjective. In this paper we present a Support Vector Machine classifier in combination with a modified version of the GrabCut method for the automatic measurement of the area affected by pressure ulcers in digital images.