Gaussian Random Fields as an Abstract Representation of Patient Metadata for Multimodal Medical Image Segmentation
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Mar 7, 2025
Abstract
The growing rate of chronic wound occurrence, especially in patients with
diabetes, has become a concerning trend in recent years. Chronic wounds are
difficult and costly to treat, and have become a serious burden on health care
systems worldwide. Chronic wounds can have devastating consequences for the
patient, with infection often leading to reduced quality of life and increased
mortality risk. Innovative deep learning methods for the detection and
monitoring of such wounds have the potential to reduce the impact to both
patient and clinician. We present a novel multimodal segmentation method which
allows for the introduction of patient metadata into the training workflow
whereby the patient data are expressed as Gaussian random fields. Our results
indicate that the proposed method improved performance when utilising multiple
models, each trained on different metadata categories. Using the Diabetic Foot
Ulcer Challenge 2022 test set, when compared to the baseline results
(intersection over union = 0.4670, Dice similarity coefficient = 0.5908) we
demonstrate improvements of +0.0220 and +0.0229 for intersection over union and
Dice similarity coefficient respectively. This paper presents the first study
to focus on integrating patient data into a chronic wound segmentation
workflow. Our results show significant performance gains when training
individual models using specific metadata categories, followed by average
merging of prediction masks using distance transforms. All source code for this
study is available at:
https://github.com/mmu-dermatology-research/multimodal-grf
