A picture paints a thousand words—the use of 3G camera mobile telephones in managing soft tissue injuries

Smartphone application for wound area measurement in clinical practice

A total of 85 consecutive patients had their wound area measured. The procedure was executed in two parts. The first was to take photographs of the wound using a smartphone and measure the area using the imitoMeasure application (imito; imito AG, Zurich, Switzerland) by two raters. The second was to take photographs of the same wound using a 10-megapixel digital camera and posterior measurement of the area using ImageJ software (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md) by one operator. The mean area of the wounds was 12.20 ± 10.45 cm² for imito and 12.67 ± 10.86 cm² for ImageJ measurement. The interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) between ImageJ and imito was 0.978 for a single measure and 0.989 for the average measure. Considering the two measurements, the ICC demonstrated excellent interobserver correlation using imito (0.987). Larger wounds had a greater difference between the methods (4.28% greater with the ImageJ measurement when considering areas >9 cm²). No difference was found between iOS (ICC, 0.995) and android (ICC, 0.970) smartphone operating systems. The smartphone application is a useful method for area measurement with excellent accuracy compared with digital photography and the ImageJ processing tool.