AI is helping to transform wound care

May 25th, 2023

Transforming wound care through telehealth.

Chronic wounds are a silent epidemic. Approximately 400,000 Australians in hospitals and residential aged care facilities (RACFs) have a chronic wound, imposing a considerable annual $3.5 billion treatment cost burden on the healthcare system. Challenges for wound care in Australian RACFs include the provision of wound assessment and treatment relying on the experience of clinical staff, specialist wound care access and limited resident mobility. In rural Australia, this is compounded by specialist workforce shortages. Additionally, most digital wound care requires peripheral devices (increasing expense and the challenge of integration into video calls), and frequently relies on transferring images via SMS or email, posing privacy and data security challenges.

Chronic wound management is complex, and traditional models of video telehealth alone are not sufficient to provide remote clinicians with adequate insight into the stage of deterioration of a wound or the overall health state of a patient. To transform wound care and allow for earlier clinical intervention, there is a need for an integrated, digital wound monitoring tool that can be utilised during video telehealth sessions. 

This unique multidisciplinary project will translate cutting edge AI computer vision technologies into a clinical setting, including a rigorous clinical validation and user led design, to build a commercial product.  It is an exciting time to see advanced computer vision and machine learning algorithms being used to support clinical assessments.

Mission

  • Rapid research translation.
  • Increase access to best-practice, evidence-based assessment, management and monitoring for RACF patients with chronic wounds.
  • Comprehensive enabling technology via a video telehealth solution.
  • Support high-quality clinical data collection.

The approach and implementation

This project known as Transforming Wound Care through Telehealth in Aged Care Project is a collaboration between the University of Sydney and Coviu, CSIRO, Australian Unity (AU), the Western NSW Primary Health Network (WNSWPHN), and the University of Technology Sydney to support telehealth video consultations in RACFs by providing AI-supported wound imaging, assessment and vital signs monitoring.

This project will translate an innovative and comprehensive technology solution to increase access to best-practice, evidence-based assessment, management and monitoring of individuals with chronic wounds in RACFs via video telehealth. Using co-design processes with frontline organisations and end users, a comprehensive digital toolkit for telehealth wound care will be developed, validated and commercialised. Using only consumer grade phone cameras or webcams for still and video image capture, artificial intelligence (Al) will be used for automated analysis of wound images and to process and estimate vital signs(e.g heart rate) from captured videos. The solution will be integrated within an existing and widely used telehealth video call platform, Coviu.

Impact

This AI project will give doctors, nurses and allied health professionals the digital tools to better assess and treat chronic wounds, and will support multidisciplinary care activities to assist older Australians with complex and chronic health needs to access higher levels of coordinated care and treatment.

One of the notable features will be mobile imaging powered by artificial intelligence (AI), allowing practitioners to remotely analyse and monitor wounds over time. It will also allow clinicians to process and estimate vital sign metrics such as a patient’s heart and respiratory rate from a video feed.

The approach and implementation

This project known as Transforming Wound Care through Telehealth in Aged Care Project, is a collaboration between the University of Sydney and Coviu, CSIRO, Australian Unity (AU), the Western NSW Primary Health Network (WNSWPHN), University of Technology Sydney and CHERE (Centre for Health Economic Research and Evaluation) to support telehealth video consultations in RACFs by providing AI-supported wound imaging, assessment and vital signs monitoring.  

Team structure

Project leaders CSIRO: Data61 (David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Ali Armin, Lars Petersson).

Team members CSIRO: Data61 (Jeremy Oorloff, Leo Lebrat, Rodrigo Santacruz, Chuong Nguyen, Yulia Arzhaeva, Mingze Xi, Ron Li, Lars Andersson), PhD students (Sam Cantrill – ANU, Remi Chierchia – QUT).

Collaborators: Silvia Pfeiffer (Coviu), Annie Banbury (Coviu), Melanie Pefani (Coviu), Rhiannon Williams (Coviu), Georgina Luscombe (USYD), Kate Smith (USYD), Mahasen Sooriyabandara (Thaum), Prithvi Reddy (Thaum), Hanna Suominen (ANU), Clinton Fookes (QUT).