Automatic Strategy for Objective Evaluation of Burn Scars Roughness on 3D Scans

The treatment of burn scars is a hotly debated and delicate subject since ineffective therapy can significantly lower quality of life. Ideally, medical evaluation should leverage objective assessments of progress over time to provide an adequate assessment of scar health and related treatment. In contrast, common clinical practice involves medical examination that rely on subjective assessment scales such as Vancouver Scar Scale and the Patient and Observer Scar Assessment Scale. Recently, extraction of objective parameters for the investigation of scar surface were studied by objectively analyzing the surface topography and extracting scar roughness through a transposition of standard mechanical surface evaluation methods, which are based on ISO 4287 and ISO 4288, to the clinical field. The most advanced methods analyze the scar roughness globally and after subdividing it in sub-patches of pre-fixed dimension. In both cases, it is not considered that the scar may be located in non-planar portions of the body, therefore, roughness values are dependent from the principal roughness evaluation direction. In the present work these shortfalls are overcome using a systematic procedure to subdivide the patches in a consistent manner and analyze smaller portions of the surface providing a roughness value independent of the filtering direction.