Computerised prediction of healing for venous leg ulcers

Application of StyleGAN Architecture for Generating Venous Leg Ulcer Images

Leg ulcers caused by impaired venous blood return are the most typical chronic wound form and have a significant negative impact on the lives of people living with these wounds. Thus, it is important to provide early assessment and appropriate treatment of the wounds to promote their healing in the normal trajectory. Gathering quality wound data is an important component of good clinical care, enabling monitoring of healing progress. This data can also be useful to train machine learning algorithms with a view to predicting healing. Unfortunately, a high volume of good-quality data is needed to create datasets of suitable volume from people with wounds. In order to improve the process of gathering venous leg ulcer (VLU) data we propose the generative adversarial network based on StyleGAN architecture to synthesize new images from original samples. We utilized a dataset that was manually collected as part of a longitudinal observational study of VLUs and successfully synthesized new samples. These synthesized samples were validated by two clinicians. In future work, we plan to further process these new samples to train a fully automated neural network for ulcer segmentation.