A Clustering Approach for Prediction of Diabetic Foot Using Thermal Images

Filipe, Vítor; Teixeira, Pedro; Teixeira, Ana

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is one of the most predominant diseases in the world, causing a high number of deaths. Diabetic foot is one of the main complications observed in diabetic patients, which can lead to the development of ulcers. As the risk of ulceration is directly linked to an increase of the temperature in the plantar region, several studies use thermography as a method for automatic identification of problems in diabetic foot. As the distribution of plantar temperature of diabetic patients do not follow a specific pattern, it is difficult to measure temperature changes and, therefore, there is an interest in the development of methods that allow the detection of these abnormal changes. The objective of this work is to develop a methodology that uses thermograms of the feet of diabetic and healthy individuals and analyzes the thermal changes diversity in the plantar region, classifying each foot as belonging to a DM or a healthy individual. Based on the concept of clustering, a binary classifier to predict diabetic foot is presented; both a quantitative indicator and a classification thresholder (evaluated and validated by several performance metrics) are presented. To measure the binary classifier performance, experiments were conducted on a public dataset (with 122 images of DM individuals and 45 of healthy ones), being obtained the following metrics: Sensitivity = 0.73, Fmeasure = 0.81 and AUC = 0.84.