Data Augmentation for Images of Chronic Foot Wounds

Training data for Neural Networks is often scarce in the medical domain, which often results in models that struggle to generalize and consequently showpoor performance on unseen datasets. Generally, adding augmentation methods to the training pipeline considerably enhances a model’s performance. Using the dataset of the Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge, we analyze two additional augmentation methods in the domain of chronic foot wounds - local warping of wound edges along with projection and blurring of shapes inside wounds. Our experiments show that improvements in the Dice similarity coefficient and Normalized Surface Distance metrics depend on a sensible selection of those augmentation methods.