Automated Detection of Diabetic Foot Ulcer Using Convolutional Neural Network

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFU) are one of the major health complications for people with diabetes. It may cause limb amputation or lead to life-threatening situations if not detected and treated properly at an early stage. A diabetic patient has a 15–25% chance of developing DFU at a later stage in his or her life if proper foot care is not taken. Because of these high-risk factors, patients with diabetes need to have regular checkups and medications which cause a huge financial burden on both the patients and their families. Hence, the necessity of a cost-effective, re-mote, and fitting DFU diagnosis technique is imminent. This paper presents a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach for the automated detection of diabetic foot ulcers from the pictures of a patient’s feet. ResNet50 is used as the backbone of the Faster R-CNN which performed better than the original Faster R-CNN that uses VGG16. A total of 2000 images from the Diabetic Foot Ulcer Grand Challenge 2020 (DFUC2020) dataset have been used for the experiment. The proposed method obtained precision, recall, F1-score, and mean average precision of 77.3%, 89.0%, 82.7%, and 71.3%, respectively, in DFU detection which is better than results obtained by the original Faster R-CNN.