An image-guided tool to prevent hospital acquired infections

Melinda Nagy; László Szilágyi; Ákos Lehotsky; Tamás Haidegger; Balázs Benyó

doi:10.1117/12.878444

14 March 2011 An image-guided tool to prevent hospital acquired infections

Melinda Nagy, László Szilágyi, Ákos Lehotsky, Tamás Haidegger, Balázs Benyó

Proceedings Volume 7962, Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing; 79623Z (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.878444
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2011, Lake Buena Vista (Orlando), Florida, United States

Abstract

Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) represent the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, and claims hundreds of thousands of lives annually in the rest of the world. This paper presents a novel low-cost mobile device|called Stery-Hand|that helps to avoid HAI by improving hand hygiene control through providing an objective evaluation of the quality of hand washing. The use of the system is intuitive: having performed hand washing with a soap mixed with UV re ective powder, the skin appears brighter in UV illumination on the disinfected surfaces. Washed hands are inserted into the Stery-Hand box, where a digital image is taken under UV lighting. Automated image processing algorithms are employed in three steps to evaluate the quality of hand washing. First, the contour of the hand is extracted in order to distinguish the hand from the background. Next, a semi-supervised clustering algorithm classies the pixels of the hand into three groups, corresponding to clean, partially clean and dirty areas. The clustering algorithm is derived from the histogram-based quick fuzzy c-means approach, using a priori information extracted from reference images, evaluated by experts. Finally, the identied areas are adjusted to suppress shading eects, and quantied in order to give a verdict on hand disinfection quality. The proposed methodology was validated through tests using hundreds of images recorded in our laboratory. The proposed system was found robust and accurate, producing correct estimation for over 98% of the test cases. Stery-Hand may be employed in general practice, and it may also serve educational purposes.

Citation Download Citation

Melinda Nagy, László Szilágyi, Ákos Lehotsky, Tamás Haidegger, and Balázs Benyó "An image-guided tool to prevent hospital acquired infections", Proc. SPIE 7962, Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing, 79623Z (14 March 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.878444

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KEYWORDS

Image segmentation

Ultraviolet radiation

Image processing

Light sources and illumination

Cameras

Feature extraction

Fuzzy logic

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