Dual-UNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Framework for the Automatic Chronic Diabetic Wound Segmentation

Foot ulcers are one of the chronic wounds commonly occurring in diabetic patients and are associated with a high risk of major or minor amputations. Evaluation and measurement of such wounds are done manually by experts to assess the wound healing and suggest further treatment. Manual assessment methods can cause infections at times and are less feasible in the existence of pandemic situations. The development of artificial intelligence has brought a revolution in many domains of medical imaging. Deep learning-based computer-aided approaches can be applied to assist clinicians in assessing and monitoring chronic wounds. Wound segmentation helps to measure wound area which is useful for assessing its healing progress. In this research work, a deep learning-based segmentation method, namely Dual-UNet is presented for precisely segmenting the diabetic foot ulcers images. The foot ulcer images are passed to Dual-UNet to generate the mask image having the segmented wound area. We proposed two modified UNets each having a customized encoder and decoder with skip connections, atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) block, and output block to improve the segmentation results. We assessed our framework by performing experimentation on two benchmark datasets, named the foot ulcer segmentation (FUSeg) challenge and the AZH segmentation dataset. Additionally, we have also assessed our Dual-UNet for cross-corpora validation to demonstrate the generalization capability of the proposed approach. The qualitative and quantitative results highlight the accuracy and effectiveness of the Dual-UN et framework for segmenting chronic diabetic wounds. Future research should focus on the development of large and diverse wound datasets and improving the results for cross-corpora evaluation.